Ramping up my Twitter and Facebook feeds

As I mentioned in an earlier post about Getting More Into Twitter, I've been more active lately on my Twitter account. It's a great way to chitchat with people in my field. I keep in touch with my publishers, talk to other indie writers, and I've even had conversations with the British Museum and Fodors Travel! Being a writer can be a bit lonely, so it's nice to have these interactions, as long as they don't hurt your word count.

It's not without its frustrations, however. A lot of people don't interact on Twitter, they just blare out their advertisements for whatever they're hawking. Indie writers are especially guilty of this. They don't seem to realize that it's social media, not asocial marketing.

I'm also getting more serious about my public Facebook page and trying to post something original there most days. I'm still not sure what's the best way to go forward with FB, though.

Do you use these social media platforms? What works best for you?

Getting more into Twitter

While I was on my press trip to Belgium I had a long talk with a colleague about the best way to use Twitter. I've been neglecting my Twitter account a bit but now I'm going to devote some more time to it. I focus on travel, history, archaeology, and the Horn of Africa. Since today is Travel Tuesday, this is a good time to get serious about it. Feel free to check it out.

A warning, though. Like with blogs, I only follow accounts I'm actually interested in. I don't play the "follow me and I'll follow you" game. All that does is inflate numbers to no purpose.

In other news, Michael over at 28mm Victorian Warfare gave me a nice review of The Scavenger. Always nice to hear someone likes my books! Michael has a cool military modelling blog where he shows off everything from elephants to 3D photos of the Boer War.

How to lose followers on Twitter

I've posted about Twitter for writers here on Midlist Writer before. I feel it can be a useful tool as long as you know what you want to do with it and stay focused. So far I've been pretty successful at keeping a good signal-to-noise ratio in who I follow, but I just had to unfollow someone for the first time.

I won't mention names in order to protect the guilty. Suffice it to say it was a feed that had a Civil War title and a bio saying the guy tweets on topics related to the American Civil War. At first he did, but as time went on more and more political commentary slipped in alongside the history links and battlefield news. For the past couple of weeks all he's been doing is spouting Nobama stuff. He hasn't said Obama is a Muslim, but I have a feeling that's coming.

Now it's totally within his right to criticize the president. What bothers me is that his Twitter feed claims he's going to tweet about the Civil War. I don't like being misled. If you want to be successful on Twitter, be open about what you're going to do. Otherwise you'll start losing followers.

I've reached 500 followers on Twitter

Today my Twitter feed reached 500 followers. I started in January and have kept it up regularly since, except for the two months I was in Ethiopia and Somaliland.

I've already talked about my first impressions of using Twitter for writers. After only a week on the service I posted saying it was a great help with my travel writing and not much good for anything else.

Eight months later, I still feel the same. Most of my activity on Twitter is travel related. I retweet my Gadling posts and pick up some good leads from other travel writers that inspire stories. Retweeting my stories nudges up my hits a bit, and it helps with this blog too. Otherwise Twitter hasn't done much. Sure, I hear about interesting news and keep tabs on the horror fiction and history markets, but these have yet to materialize into real advantages. If it wasn't for the help for my travel writing, Twitter would be a waste of my time and I'd ditch it.

Writers need to budget their time carefully. Too often writers feel they have to take on every new social networking tool to help their exposure. We don't. We need to find what works for us and ignore the rest so we can spend the maximize amount of time and energy on writing.

So who is my 500th follower? Kristin Martin, who describes herself as a writing mom. She's new at Twitter so I don't really know much else about her. Welcome anyway, Kristin, and good luck in this crazy world of writing.

I'm on Twitter!

I got a Twitter account last week. You can find me at @WriterSean. On my other blog, I've written about my first impressions of Twitter from a travel writer's perspective.

Feel free to follow me! I'm always happy to network with writers and readers.