writerlywitterings

What is it about social media?

Posted by writerlywitterer on 19/09/2011 · 5 Comments 

Right, I know I’m not the most reliable blogger or tweeter in the world, but there are times when you just have to get on with the day job, and writing a 1,000 word commentary doesn’t always fit in with it.

Today, for example, I am immersed in the middle of an almost two month long battle. Coming up for air to think about the twenty-first century isn’t so easy.

It was partly because of that that I began to investigate all these new social media gizmos. Well, it was the publisher, in fact. They told me that they wanted me to focus on things like Twitter and Facebook, and I trundled off into the middle distance to think hard about them.

How much good are they, though?

From the publisher’s point of view, they’re great. They need little publisher intervention (read for that, cost, expense, investment) and no staff involvement. The author is working hard at getting his or her ideas over, but the publisher can sit back and rake in the profits. That’s the idea.

Good cover!

But does it work?

Well, the crucial bit is, getting your ideas across. If you’re contacting lots of people, well, then you’re risking success. Because the more people you contact as an author, the more may discover they like your work.

But how do authors use the social media available. I was thinking hard about this over the weekend. Why? Because I got really, really close to 800 followers on Twitter, and my Facebook users have almost reached 5,000 again. I say again, because eight months ago I went through an extensive process of trying to evict people. Did it work? Did it heck.

People keep on contacting me. They are writers, they say, and want to join and network. That’s nice, but I don’t anticipate selling too many books to people who contact me hoping to sell theirs. There are others, who use Facebook as blatant marketing. They ask to become a friend, and then post asking me (and my FB friends) to go to their site, buy a book and “like” their pages. Well, I’m afraid I don’t stay friends with them for long. I chuck them off. I’m not working on my pages in order to sell other people’s works. Genuine friends, yes. If I could help Paul Johnston, Stella Duffy, Ruth Edwards, Quintin Jardine, I would. They are real friends of mine. I like to help my friends.

But no, my FB pages are there for two reasons. One, the “author” page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Michael.Jecks.author is purely to help sell books. Come on, you all know that really, if you’ve seen the page – and if you haven’t, please go and “like” it!

The other page is my personal one. Yes, if you search for me, you’ll find it. But this isn’t really a direct selling page. It’s the one I do use for friends, family and a select number of FB people who have become friends. Not friends I’ve met, but folks I’d genuinely like to meet (Tom, yes, and you too, Paul, and you, Loren, amongst many others).

So, I really do not want to have a load of people putting comments on which are purely to flog their own books. Nor, because I detest them, do I want invitations to join damn silly games on there. Which is why they get removed as soon as I find them. As are the increasing number of invitations to become over-friendly with extremely pretty young women who think my mugshot shows me to be particularly handsome. First, I am not that good looking, and second, I am not that gullible. So those messages too get removed.

Does Facebook sell books? I doubt it. Almost all the people I know on it have got to find the pages because they knew my work and enjoyed it. It brings no new readership.

But then there is Twitter. Now, this is a site I do like, because it’s like knowing that there is a good conversation going on, into which I can dip when I get time. Like a dinner party, and I’m serving the food. I can’t keep hold of every comment, but when I come in with each course, I can rejoin the chatter. It’s fun. And does it sell books?

Maybe it does. But like I said earlier, I was up to nearly 800 users on Saturday, and I watched for some time to see when I would cross that barrier. But although I kept scoring more and more users, there were some dropping out all the time too, and I wondered why. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

In the end I did a quick search and found something called Twitter Unfollow Tracker. Weird. All of a sudden I learned of a huge number of odd followers whom I had wondered about when they said that they were following me, but who suddenly dropped me like a hot spud. So I began to look at them.

There were a surprising number of financial services people. Hmm. There were a lot of folks who sold themselves as internet media consultants and the like. Hmm again. Looking through, I realised that there were quite a lot of folks who were befriending me, and then stopping their following a few days later. Some were faster, others slower, but on average they’d go within four days.

That was when I had an email suggesting I try TweetBig. Aha, I thought, what is this?

It’s a software firm that provides you with the potential to increase your followers. It asks you what sort of follower you are interested in, what sort of hashtags you want to emphasise, and then wanders off into cyberspace and sort of kicks over the bins and rootles around in order to find people you’d be interested in. Then it contacts them, friends them, and if they don’t reciprocate, it drops them again.

This way, apparently, people can increase their followers rapidly.

Now, I looked at some of the folks who’d followed me and then dropped me. Many, I didn’t follow back. Why? Well, if it’s a firm selling media consultancy, I don’t have the time to read their blogs or the money to hire them. There’s no point. If it’s a company selling Chryslers in Delaware, likewise, it’s not of any interest to me here in Blighty. I like to drop in on pleasant folks who are interested in and talking about things which interest me.

However, if you look at the sort of folks who do this trolling, they end up with 30,000, 40, 000, or more followers. Well, I wonder how many sales they get from all those?

There are others, too. A strange number of people whose tweets I’d followed seemed to fall off the radar. Very peculiar, but a number seemed to link to me for a week or so, and then ditch me. Well, it was hurtful. So I reciprocated on that, too!

But what is the point of this social media. We are told by the firms concerned that they really want to bring people together in the internet age. They are companies with interest in people. They don’t want people to become isolated.

So, how do they achieve this? They stop people talking face to face. They prevent normal dialogue. They sell the ability to use a telephone, yes, a device to allow you to talk, as a means of typing messages. This is not a way to increase communication except in the most non-human manner.

The companies want to help people. Then they allow other companies to link in and sell applications that take all human contact away. There are systems which store and forward your messages, so that when you’re away, your followers still get their momentary fix of your comments. Theoretically. There are all too many which allow you to automatically follow someone, or send a message to people who have followed you. This isn’t adding to the sum of human joy, is it, now?

But these kindly, humanitarian, social-based companies are there to help. They are the new businesses, not nasty old capitalist firms, but organisations which depend upon nice folks who only want to communicate.

And now they all take adverts.

So, let’s get these things clear in our minds, eh?

Social media. What’s it all about?

It’s about huge businesses making money for themselves. Along the way the occasional author or alternative businessman may make a few dollars as well, but that is a fortuitous event, not a by-product.

Will I continue to use FB and Twitter? Yup. Twitter I find rather fun, although with adverts and sponsored trending, it’ll become a great deal less so. FB is enjoyable, and can be useful for marketing, I think.

But let’s not fool ourselves that either of them is a serious business medium for selling books. They are not!

Boy, was I young then. Those shelves are now full of my books!