Social Media – A Beginner’s Thoughts On Twitter and More.

I may have said this before somewhere on here but when I first decided to try my hand at making money from my writing, I thought the ability to write well would be the key. Now don’t get me wrong, despite what some people say the ability to write lively interesting copy is paramount. You can blog and twitter and dig all you like but if your writing is essentially rubbish, I feel strongly that you are doomed. However, social media is the new advertising and you are going to have to get a grip of it. Here are two of the things I do and my thoughts on them.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/home Fabulous. People say I have texting tourette’s because I just send so many. It is the sheer immediacy of them I love. Tweeting ( as us pro’s call it) has the same thrill, only with a much bigger audience and the ever present possibility of that audience growing.

How it works: Expect to be confused when you first look at a twitter conversation window, I was. It soon becomes clear though. Create your profile page and start to tweet. The program will check through your email and msn accounts to see if there is anyone in there that already tweets and then you can choose to follow them, this means when they tweet you will see it. This is how I got my start but if that fails for you there are two other ways to increase your network. When you tweet people can find it through a keyword search of twitter here http://www.ghacks.net/2008/02/04/twitter-real-time-search/ so if you use terms in twitter that appeal to them they will find you. That is a good reason to make sure that at least some of your tweets contain words that link to your main interest or to writing if that is what you are trying to sell. Secondly, I used this tool http://twitter.com/MrTweet to ferret out some people I thought sounded interesting, when I chose to follow them a lot of them followed me back, unless they were twitter super stars with thousands of followers.

Why should I do it?: It creates interest in your blog or website, simple as that. When I complete a new blog entry I tweet the url and within minutes people have visited it. If they find it through a keyword search for writing they may even be people who want to hire me, not happened yet, but I am still fairly new. Plus, it is fun.

Diggit: It is an article sharing place, people submit article that they think may be of interest to other people.

How it works: http://digg.com/ People submit articles by logging in and pasting the url. Or by pressing the diggit button on the bottom of the blogg or article in question ( not worked out how to get one of those yet, more when I do). In reality you submit your own work, which sounded sycophantic to me at first but it really is how it works, chances are no-one is going to do it for you. It is then displayed as an article recently submitted in whatever section you chose for it. People can also find it through a keyword search. If it starts getting votes then it will be displayed in hot posts sections, but don’t get too giddy about this idea because none of mine have ever got a single vote except my own and I don’t think it is because I am crap (you may disagree, feel free).

Why should I do it?: Again, through the keyword search and recent posting board it will lead people to your site, it also show cases your writing which is no bad thing.

There is loads more social media out there and I will let you know what else is good when I get my head around it. It is basically modern advertising, self marketing, I am not sure you can survive without it these days.