My take on the Social Media Circus

I've been using a couple of different social media platforms for a while now; long enough to have a reasonably good grasp on what's hot and what's not. If you're interested in my view, read on and feel free to leave a comment below.

Now first of all, allow me to clarify which minimal number of sites I use and have an opinion on. It may be obvious from the side bar to your right that I use the basics, Facebook and Twitter. (If you're not viewing this on the actual blog, then you can't see what I'm talking about. I took the liberty of placing a link to here below, as well as links to me on Facebook and Twitter. Bookmark them for endless streams of my brain-dribble.)

{ http://www.damienlmalcolm.blogspot.com }
{ http://www.facebook.com/damienlmalcolm }
{ http://www.facebook.com/WinchesterSeries }
{ http://www.twitter.com/damienlmalcolm or the handle @DamienLMalcolm }

Anywho, I mainly only use these two because, well quite frankly, nothing else measures up. And when I say "measures up", I mean exactly that. For me, Facebook ranks about a 9 on the usefulness scale, with Twitter toddling behind at around a 6. I'm also supposedly on Google+, which sits at more than zero, but less than one on my scale. I'd place you a link for my page on there, if I could find one. Like the rest of Google+, it's pointless trying.

In fact, while we're on the topic of Google+, may I state the obvious and say that I find it incredibly crap. Google, God bless 'em, really did try to drag themselves into the social arena. They just didn't cut it, I'm afraid. I signed up for a "+" page because all the experts said it was the thing to do when you're an author looking to make headway in the big wide world. Now I find myself wondering why I did it. I "circled" a couple of people, shared a couple of posts and "+1'd" a few things (Seriously? +1? Who the hell came up with that???) but it just never grew on me. Every now and again, I drop back and check the page, only to find a disjointed, odd-coloured stream of random things from various people I don't know; presumably things that are "trending" in the magical world of +es. I don't know. Just seems pointless.

Twitter on the other hand, does fill a small gap in a person's social media requirement quota. Though I'm not sure if I use Twitter in the same way as everyone else. To me, Twitter is a great method of speaking, in short sentences, directly with a person, whether it be someone you know, or a person somewhere up in the ethereal wonderland. It's almost like having a phonebook with the mobile phone numbers of anyone remotely famous. You can send little text messages to celebrities just like you would your best mates.  I've tweeted to ABC radio presenters (they reply), movie stars and musicians (they don't reply) and even other authors (sometimes they reply). It gives me a little tickle when someone even mildly famous tweets back to me directly, favourites or retweets something I said. It shows their human, and respecting their audience, which is nice. Only a few years ago celebrities where sooo distant from us down here, and the only way you could contact them was to write to a fan club. On paper! Now the world of twitter brings many of them down out of that unreachable cloud, and allows an everyday bloke like myself to send small compliments and opinions to them, and have the sometimes respond. It's nice, and does a lot toward bringing us all together that bit more.

I made the mistake when I first signed up for Twitter of following quite a few people and re-following anyone who followed me, then treating the newsfeed the same way I treat Facebook. It was a big mistake because if I didn't check that newsfeed in a day, I'd have a stream of literally hundreds of tweets to scroll over. And they'd be everything from "I have a small spot on my left buttock cheek" retweeted from some cracker in the US, to a traffic report of a local car accident four hours ago, to a Youtube preview of the latest Dr Who episode, to the twenty-fifth repeat of a tweet about an author's kindle page, or a beautiful picture of the Aurora Borealis. The record on my feed for one 24hr period is 262 tweets, with a ratio of around 70/30 crap. You see, one vast difference between Facebook and Twitter is where the Facebook newsfeed sort of picks out the best things to show you from your various friends and liked pages, which means you may miss the odd thing, Twitter gives you EVERYTHING.

In other words, there was enough important or interesting stuff to keep me scrolling and actually reading, as well as enough rubbish to just make me want to close the account. I've since learned that apparently the way to truly use Twitter as a news facility is to have an app like Tweetdeck or something sitting open all day on your office computer so you can see the feed in real-time, as opposed to exhaustingly scrolling it on your phone while brushing your teeth at 11pm. In such a way, I can understand how Twitter is a massively useful service for news producers and media. Only problem with that is, being a mobile Handyman, I don't work at a desk all day. So using Twitter in real-time for me is unobtainable, even if I wanted to. Just means I get a tweet from an ABC Radio host saying, "an interview with [insert famous person or politician] is live on air right now", five hours after the interview occurred. But as I say, it is still very useful for chatting to people directly, which can be fun... if maybe a little annoying for the recipient. (Sorry Belinda. I tweet because I care. :) )

By the way, I once did a "Know Your Promotional Skill Level" quiz on the Interwebs, that basically asked me questions to suss out how good I was at selling myself and my books. I got most of the questions right, but one of the ones I got wrong was one relating to Twitter. It said something like, "How frequently should you tweet? A: Every hour? B: Once a day? C: 2 - 3 times a week?" I answered 2 to 3 times a week, because at the time I was completely over being bombarded with other people's tweets about nothing, and as a rule that's the rate I'm comfortable tweeting at. I was wrong. Apparently, the correct answer was A: Every hour.

Every bloody hour?? No wonder I was getting bombarded, if that's what the experts are telling people to do. There are people following me that have 25,000 other people that they follow. If every one of those nutters did that quiz and decided to ramp up their profile, that would amount to a total of 500,000 tweets a day! A bloke would do nothing else but sit at a computer all day reading tweets about how cold some lady's toes are because of the snow falling in Istanbul. That's not a life. And the bit that got me the most was, the thing gave me advice at the end saying that I should consider purchasing a third party app that can automate my tweets for me to "boost my market penetration". So I could send out a tweet saying "Buy my book here https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259889?ref=damienlmalcolm " over and over again, every single hour, 24 hours a day. Wow, I'm sure my followers are going to be right into that! I've had that sort of thing in my newsfeed before, and it sucks. In fact, now if I get that, I report it as spam. And I've since un-followed most of my Twitter-friends, the ones I actually don't find any interest in, and thankfully reduced my feed down to manageable levels.

Facebook, on the other hand, ticks every box. I keep my friends down to only people I actually know, I run a page for my first book, another for my local Handyman business which gets great response from customers, and I leave most of my private page open to the public as a bit of an author thing for followers. Facebook's newsfeed scrolls at a comfortable pace, allowing a busy bloke to just pop in once or twice a day for five to ten minutes at a time while hoeing down some lunch between jobs. I can whack up a photo easily (not of my lunch!) and it keeps me abreast of the goings-on. It's great for funnies. Of course the peaceful harmony I speak of can also be abused by some, which leads to addiction. The average young person seems to have around 800 friends on Facebook, and I once saw a profile of a fella that had 2,500 friends and liked 27,000 pages! What's the point in that? If I post something on my page, a bloke like that is never going to see it. My post would be buried under a mountain of who knows what, and unless he checks his feed literally every single waking minute of his day, he'd simply never keep up. Bloody nuts!

From a promotional point of view, Facebook is good in the way that I can rig up a small ad and target it directly to my audience, who then receive a small box at the side of their page with a pic of my book in it. The ads are, for the most part, unobtrusive but focused, meaning my meagre advertising budget is being spent efficiently and it's not going out to people who would only be annoyed by it. Like Twitter, Facebook also lets you talk directly with some people, though if it's a famous person you're wanting to chat to, chances are they're actually paying someone else to manage their page for them and you're not really taking to the stars themselves.

I've never tried out the other social networking sites that seem to be springing up like weeds in a farmer's paddock. There used to be Bebo, there are old narrow-band ones like Myspace and Linkedin, and there are all these new weird little chat things I keep hearing about. But really, there's no point  me checking out any of them. Between having a family, running a business, writing books, keeping up with current social sites and occasionally scribbling out something on this blog, this bloke's just a little too busy to need any extra commitments right now. Speaking of which, it's time I nodded off.

Please feel free to let me know what social networks you use most, and what you think of them. Agree with my views? Disagree? Tell me how you feel in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

Till next time,
-Damien.