Is It Really Social? Calling All Readers…and Authors!

During my fairly substantial hiatus from social media channels over the past couple of years, I’ve had a lot of time in which to ponder the channels themselves and the way in which people use them. When I first began using WordPress a number of years ago to write a blog about my adventures in a new country, it was like entering a whole new world where people write interesting articles and I could follow them if I wanted with no pressure at all, or expectations that someone would follow me back. That was then. It was a joy and I felt like I met like-minded people.

And now we add in the writing of books and the hope that I can utilise social media to get them noticed. The social media world looks quite different through this lens.

It feels like social media is not really social at all. On Twitter, for example, once you have finished wading through the copious amounts of advertising, you find a lot of people who basically exist on there to put out meaningless nonsense in the name of having something to say (which they really don’t) and desperately trying to expand their follower base. I don’t believe the Twitter community are overly interested in anything they follow, but nor do I feel they can be THAT interested because they can’t actually see it in amongst the aforementioned adverts, and nor is there enough time in a day to respond to everything they may follow. Go figure. So do I shut it down? I’m not sure. It is after all another medium of communication and it might be cutting off my nose to spite my face. But then that same channel is going through a highly dubious ownership and direction change.

I always felt that Facebook had similar issues to Twitter.

And is anyone on WordPress looking for their next read? I’m not sure about that either, though there are plenty of folks reviewing books. The community still feels more genuine to me though, like there is less pressure and it is more about people expressing their passions.

I’ve yet to work out what value Goodreads has because I’m not overly sure how to leverage that channel.

So we come to the purpose of this post, namely whether anyone has any thoughts on how, as an author, to best use social media? All thoughts welcome.

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