The Sharing Ecosystem - Instagram for Writers.

One of the cool things about Twitter for writers is the ability to re-tweet fellow writers. It's become such a ubiquitous function of the platform that many of us do it without so much as a second thought.

Instagram is another social media platform that writers have taken to with enthusiasm. I myself use it a lot. It's helpful in teasing bits and pieces of the projects I'm working on as well as promoting my published titles. It's also useful in helping fellow authors reach new readers by way of sharing their posts. And yet, in my experience, I've yet to see the scale of content sharing on Instagram that I've seen on Twitter. 

I'm puzzled as to why it hasn't seemed to have taken off to the same degree. One reason could be that it's not as simple as it is on Twitter. It requires a few more steps to achieve the same or similar outcome. For me, the process of re-sharing or "re-gramming" content is really easy. 

I use an app called "Regrann", which I picked up free from Google Play.

(image credit: Regrann.com)

The app integrates with your Instagram app and the learning curve is fairly simple. In order to use it in-situ, all that's required is for you to choose the post that you want to share, tap on the three dot icon in the top right hand corner of the Instagram post and select "Copy Link" from the drop-down menu. The image will then open in a Regrann menu that looks something like this...

(image credit: Regrann.com)

You have several options available to you, but the one we want is the Instagram icon on the far right. Upon tapping this, you're then taken back to the Instagram app where you'll find the image has populated a new post. If you're satisfied with how the image looks, you can tap through to the "Write a caption" pane. Here, instead of writing a caption, all you have to do is tap and hold in the caption pane, triggering the "Paste" and "Clipboard" menu. Then tap "Paste".

(image credit: Regrann.com)

What happens is that the original poster's caption will populate the pane, along with a "Reposted from @(username)" - whose ever that is. Regrann adds a #regrann following the post. You can actually edit the caption as you wish. I sometimes do this if I want to add some content of my own - say, a shout out to the original poster of the content or some extra hashtags if I think they will help. 

Once you hit "Share", you're done. The post will appear in your feed along with the accompanying caption that essentially tags the original poster so they'll know you shared their content. 

There are numerous apps out there - on both Android and Apple platforms - that will help you achieve the same result and they each have their own individual quirks and functions. For me, Regrann has been the easiest app for me to adopt. 

It's a great way of helping your writer and creative friends *potentially* reach a new audience. I see a lot of re-sharing of content among many groups of Instagrammers - but not so much among writers.

It would be a good thing to see more often. 

DFA.

Going Social (Or Losing One's Sanity Among Friends).

It used to be the case that I actively sought out every single social networking platform available if it had the potential for me to sell my books. When I was first published back in 2010, I took on this task enthusiastically, occupying every single space I could and I shouted – Oh Man Did I Shout – because I thought that was what you had to do in order to be successful. 

But I quickly learned that, aside from the fact that there are millions of others out there shouting just as loudly, having a presence everywhere was hard work. It was really hard work. It didn't sell my books. And it didn't make me happy. I soon began to resent it. 

Some will say that making as many connections as possible is key to growing your author brand and being successful. It's not. Others say that you have to maintain a frequent and active presence on social media in order to be successful. That's true...kind of. 

image credit: www.9gag.com

Some time ago, I reassessed my own platform and I quickly discovered why it was making me so unhappy – aside from the realization that “BUY MY BOOKS” wasn't working. I was in too many places at once. Trying to do to many things in those places without considering what those places could offer me that could streamline my workload. Eventually, I decided to jettison a lot of those platforms, bringing it back to a small number of interconnected ones. I also changed the way I present myself to the wider world. 

Central to my online platform is my author website. This is the core portal for everything related to my writing and it is here where I have information about myself, my books (including links to purchase those books), samples of my writing style in the form of short stories and unedited samples from my published works and links to media I have done – including interviews and podcast appearances. I maintain a blog here as well and I try (with the emphasis on “try”) to post once a week. That regimen is admittedly, hard to maintain particularly when I am heavily involved in a project. 

The next important portal is my Facebook Author Page. Here I post links to my blog posts when I post them. I'll also post links to interesting articles – usually related to writing or media – and you'll often find posts that promote the work of others, my friends who are writers or musicians whose work I like to support. Sometimes I'll post status updates that are just random, stream of consciousness type posts – things that I find funny and that I hope others will too. I have my Author Page linked to my Twitter account so that any time I post something on my Page, it'll immediately post to Twitter. I always try to come in under the 140 character limit dictated by Twitter so that my tweets won't get truncated and I always try to use hashtags – to enhance the potential of those posts being seen. 

image credit: two beans or not two beans.

I have a love/hate relationship with my Facebook Author Page. Facebook makes it hard for Page content to be seen without the Boost Your Post option – whereby you pay as much or as little as you want to promote your post - and they aren't transparent with their algorithms that they use to determine which posts get seen over others. There are a wealth of articles online that discuss this very issue and the conversations are quite complex. I have paid to boost posts in the past although I cannot attest to how successful they were. 

Twitter is the portal I tend to inhabit the most these days. This is the one place where I feel I made the most mistakes in how not to conduct oneself on a social network but it is the place where I have learned a lot. I use Twitter these days to converse and interact with people. I don't use Twitter to sell my books. A few years ago, it was the other way around. I will occasionally post a link to my work and “promote” myself but I find that the best way to use Twitter is to interact and participate in conversation, curate valuable content related to writing and I often get breaking news stories on Twitter before I get them anywhere else. I am also, not a proponent of following as many people as possible on Twitter. Some will argue that this is essential to maximizing your marketing potential, your brand but I don't agree. Twitter does not sell books.

image credit: CBS interactive.

Goodreads is a platform that I have largely automated so that content from my blog and my Twitter accounts are automatically posted to my Goodreads profile. I don't see a great level of interaction with my posts – occasionally I'll get a like or a comment but those are rare. What it does offer is a good profile space, it has all of my titles listed there along with reviews and it has links to purchase them. Of course, Goodreads is reader specific, so there is potential to engage with readers by way of the groups and communities there, however these can be time consuming and difficult to navigate.

Pinterest is a tool I have come to regard as increasingly valuable as a creative tool. For my upcoming novel The Recipient (Central Avenue Publishing), I created a board specifically for my research where I pinned imagery of settings that I wanted to for the novel, samples of architecture that would help me describe certain places, samples of furnishings that I wanted to put in those places. Even images of nightmares that would help me to describe the nightmares my protagonist, Casey Schillinge, experiences in the novel. Most importantly, I built up a catalog of people, faces both known and unknown that helped me to visualize the characters I wanted to portray in the novel. Again, I don't use Pinterest as a promotional tool however it does have a certain promotional value if readers and those who are familiar with my work want to step inside my creative mind to see what drives me. 

Instagram is a part of my platform that I use totally for fun and it represents the most personal side of myself. Here I tend to post random images and short videos, of things that inspire me, engage me and make me laugh. It also has the option of sharing content to both Facebook and Twitter and promotes the use of hashtags to add additional specificity to the descriptions of my content. Again, I don't use Instagram with promotion in mind but I will admit I have recently begun to structure promotional posts. I do these sparingly however as I don't want to piss people off.

I do have a presence on LinkedIn but I don't use it nearly as much. With it's corporate focus and limited functionality (in my opinion), LinkedIn is a curious platform that I have never been fully able to come to grips with. 

Google's G+ is another platform that I use but use sparingly. My blog posts, which are powered by Google's Blogger, are automatically shared to G+ but as a tool for engagement I find it frustratingly barren. I have tried many times to interact with my connections there but it is rare – if ever – that they reciprocate.

image credit: We Know Memes.

There are so many social networking portals out there on the web, with new ones being added every day. I used to subscribe to the maxim that, as an author, you have to be on as many platforms as possible to grow your brand. But that is simply untrue and it is a sure fire way to burn out quickly and start to resent your author brand. 

By having a small, interconnected “portfolio” of platforms, you can maintain your author brand efficiently while interacting with and enhancing your connections. You will actually enjoy yourself and most importantly, you will be able to invest more in the activity that brought you here in the first place. 

Writing.

DFA.

Have We, As Authors, Reached Peak Twitter?

Have we, as authors, reached the point of Peak Twitter?

Last week, I had something akin to an epiphany with respect to Twitter as a marketing or promotional tool.

In a blisteringly honest blog post entitled "Please Shut Up - Why self promotion as an author doesn't work.", author Delilah S. Dawson surgically dissected and examined everything that is currently wrong about author self promotion and why, basically, it is a futile endeavour.

image credit: Delilah S. Dawson.

To be clear, Dawson didn't actually conclude that self promotion in its entirety doesn't work. But she did illuminate a lot of the things that authors do that simply aren't effective as a selling tool. From Twitter to Facebook to Instagram and others in between, Dawson examined each of these platforms and explained why each of them, as a means to promote, market and sell, are an abject failure. 

Twitter is essentially an echo chamber in which the millions of shouts of "BUY MY BOOK" of are bouncing of the walls and hitting nothing. With Facebook, it is the gross manipulation of that platform by Zuckerberg's minions that compromises its worth. it basically forces you to hand over cash in the hope that, by boosting or promoting your "BUY MY BOOK" shouts, you *might* reach a larger audience...of bots. With Instagram - nobody is on Instagram because they want to "BUY YOUR BOOK". 

The post got a lot of attention - viral attention - and it was an equal spread of loving and loathing. Dawson's conclusion was that there are no sure fire answers to selling books in this over saturated market place. But, her take away message was - for me - a positive one. 

An author can self promote, but the goal of any promotion should not be to push themselves onto a prospective audience. Any promotional effort must be one that pulls an audience towards them. 

Dawson then discussed the ways in which an author can do that effectively but, with caveat that any promotional effort takes commitment and hard work and a whole lot of luck.

"Literature is not a #teamfollowback sport."  

This was the best line of the article. 

It got me thinking about my own approach to self promotion as an author and how I have conducted myself over the years. 

I freely admit that of all the mistakes that can possibly be made with respect to social media promotion, I have made them. I've done whole #teamfollowback thing, participated in hash-tag parties, exchanged likes for likes and up-clicked reviews on Amazon for authors who've asked me to do so. 

It doesn't work. None of it works. 

I've had a Twitter account in a couple of incarnations since 2010. In that time I have done things that I thought one should to foster visibility. Follow as many authors as possible, re-tweet the shit out of them, do the hash-tag thing, promote, promote, promote, BUY MY BOOK. 

Conversely, what I was seeing from my efforts on Twitter, was a whole bunch of follows from other authors, a ridiculous amount of automated messages and/or @ replies pointing me towards Facebook pages and Amazon author pages and BUY MY BOOK requests. At first, I stupidly saw it as kind of exhilarating - to be seemingly receiving so much attention from so many people.  I didn't get the concept of "automated" tweets. 

And then I got it...And I didn't like it. It doesn't work. None of it works. And it didn't make me happy. In fact, it just made me depressed.

Recently, I read an article about the concept of Dunbar's Number. Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990's, Dunbar's Number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. That limit or suggested number is 150. 

At the end of last week the number of people I was following on Twitter was up around the 800 mark.  

So I began to look a little deeper into the kinds of people I was following on Twitter, particularly my home feed. I didn't like what I saw. An endless stream of BUY MY BOOK or BUY HIS/HER BOOK. I'll admit, I stopped going to my home feed a long time ago because of this very trend but focusing solely on this feed for the purposes of observation was kind of a shock. And then I clicked into a few of the profiles.  

How can anyone reasonably expect to have any kind of positive or influential interaction with these kinds of metrics? 

You can't. There is absolutely no possibly of cutting through with the sheer enormity of these numbers. Though I suspect, that is not the aim of the game for these particular people. They've bought into the #teamfollowback mantra as enthusiastically as worshippers at a Benny Hinn sermon.  

Well, they can have it. But they won't have me.  

With Dunbar's Number in mind (though not necessarily the end game), I've mercilessly culled the number of people I'm following on Twitter. As a platform, I've decided that it is no longer about promoting or marketing or indeed hard selling. 

It just doesn't work. 

I am after something more meaningful, more organic - real interaction. At a time when many are questioning the value of Facebook as an effective means of communication for communication's sake, I wanted to test the question of whether Twitter can be anything more than an echo chamber of snot. 

The results, so far, have been encouraging. I actually scroll through my home feed now. I see content that is much more engaging and entertaining and thought provoking - such as the Delilah S. Dawson article. I have interacted with people purely for the pleasure of conversing without any agenda or motivation. And it is a place that I want to be - infinitely more-so than before. My actions are in no way an indication of my reluctance to follow new people in future. It just means that I want more out of this social networking tool than I did before. I will be more discerning. 

For promotion, marketing or selling ourselves as authors, we have indeed reached Peak Twitter. 

It is not the answer.

DFA.

Hit - the electrifying new novel from Delilah S. Dawson - Out Now.

Like Is The Hardest Addiction.

Last week, I began an experiment with Facebook after reading this article, by Elan Morgan about Facebook 'Likes'.

I have increasingly found myself becoming dissatisfied with Facebook and what I've seen as the lack of engagement among my social network. 

The basic premise of the article was that Facebook 'Likes' are actually manipulated by Facebook to push certain content into your news feed based on your activity. The article also suggests that simply 'Liking' content on Facebook is detrimental to the notion of social networking and engagement and I gotta say, it resonated with me. 

For too long, I was quite happy to go along with 'Liking' people's updates or photos or links without actually engaging with their message. I made what I felt to be the erroneous assumption that 'Liking' something was enough. 

But it isn't.

Like logo is Copyright © Facebook Ltd.

Liking stuff simply clogged up my feed with an ever growing stream of disengaging content (those fucking memes being the worst).

In a subsequent discussion I kicked off on Facebook, I made the point that, to me, Liking is akin to slacktivism. You can blindly scroll through your feed and click 'Like' on friends updates as if it were of no consequence but it doesn't equate to engagement.

So, I made the decision to quit Liking content on Facebook. Instead, I actively made an effort to interact with content that I personally found engaging. If I had an opinion about something someone posted, I commented. I made an active effort to comment my appreciation for what my friends were sharing and I also made the effort to re-share content with an updated status of my own that told my friends what I thought about the content I was sharing. 

I also made an effort to hide content I don't want to see anymore - aka - those fucking memes! There is a really handy function within the mobile app in particular that allows you to hide content that is shared by your friends without hiding their streams entirely. For example - I got so sick of seeing posts from "I Fucking Love Science". Sure - I do actually (fucking) love science, but seeing those posts every single day eroded my enjoyment of Facebook. 

The results, while not absolute, are encouraging. 

By not 'Liking' everything that vaguely impresses me, I've found myself having some really great discussions about different topics. I've also seen a large decrease in the amount of memes and superfluous content in my feed and in their place, I am seeing much more organic visual content - personal photos from friends which vary in their interest but I much prefer. I am also seeing content from friends I actually forgot I had. This goes to my suspicions that Facebook has been manipulating the content I see in my feed based on my past behavior.

Actively sharing content from friends has also become much more satisfying. I made the comment recently that if I share something of yours, it is because I care about you. The positivity of that 'paying it forward' has been borne out in both comments and increased interaction between myself and my friends. 

So it's been a week. And I can honestly say that I have enjoyed a greater satisfaction with Facebook overall. My interaction with it has been lesser - simply because I have a busy life - but the quality of that interaction has increased markedly. 

In conclusion, I recommend you try it out. Make the leap and really question what you want your feed to look like. By not Liking content straight up, actually interacting with the sharer of that content and actively hiding content that doesn't engage you, I'll bet you'll find your user experience greatly improved. 

DFA.  

The Twitter Beast.

An article popped up in my Twitter feed this morning that had been re-shared by one of my favorite people, Rachel Thompson. Penned by author and writing coach Rebecca T. Dickson, the article was a personal reflection on the beast that is Twitter and how profoundly overwhelming it can be for a newcomer to this most popular of social networking tools. Dickson's article lead me to think about my own "relationship" with Twitter and I thought it worthy of exploring here.

Of all the mistakes that can be made with Twitter, you can bet that I have made them.

When I first began my Twitter “career” around the time of The Hambledown Dream's publication in 2010, I really had no idea what I was doing. I think I set up my account on the advice of a friend who said that it is "essential" to my "platform". At the time, I was like - ??? - but, eager to adopt anything that would help my efforts to get noticed, I dove in to the ocean head first.

And I tended to observe (the worst of) what other writers were doing, thinking that what they were doing was what I had to do. It wasn't merely a congenial marketplace in which to sell ones wares. Rather, I found it to be a battle - a war almost - to be heard, to get the edge and to be noticed. I used every third party plug in there was available - from friend finders, to re-tweet engines, to group tweeters. I gravitated towards a number of self appointed 'gurus' who were out there making more noise than anyone else, because I mistakenly believed it would give me the edge I needed in the market place where it is all about sales. There is no room therein for connection...or so I thought.

I realized, after too long a period of time, that everything I was doing was completely wrong – that I was doing untold damage to myself as a presence on Twitter - as brand, if you will. I realized that no-one was listening. I was just another voice in the scream - kinda like that scene in Titanic, after the ship goes down and the camera pulls back on the desperate swimmers in the water, fighting to be heard.

I reconsidered everything – dropped the blanket promotion and the third party plug-ins and the (seemingly) desperate re-tweet groups. I began to treat myself, not as a marketing tool and began to take a deeper look at who I was following and who was following me. In the effort to make a sale, I missed out on whole strands of potential conversation in my blind pursuit of...whatever it was I was trying to pursue. I actually lost sight of my goals in all of that white noise from before.

So I began to tweet organically a whole lot more. I began to look more closely for people who were stimulating conversation both with me and with the Twitter-sphere more broadly. I looked at what they were talking about and found common threads of perspective. Since then, my own satisfaction with Twitter has grown exponentially. My new approach has paid off also - in terms of how my content is influencing others via re-tweets and the conversations I have contributed to and those which I have started myself. 

And, I have allowed myself to have fun with it.

Do I still promote? Absolutely – I am a published author with two novels, one novella and a contribution to an anthology that I want them to sell and sell well - and I am human after all. 

I’ll admit, here and now, that I probably still do the promotion thing too much. But, I am far more disciplined than I was. I'll slip in the occasional promo tweet here and there but that is not my motivation for my presence on Twitter anymore. 

I have learned the lesson of the Twitter Beast. 

And she is a pussy cat...

image credit: Izra (via Deviantart)

Follow me on Twitter at Hambledown_Road.

DFA.