Useful Social Media Tips for Writers

As a writer you want to promote yourself as much as possible, without making it appear that you are promoting yourself. This is a very important notion if you want to stand out from the crowd. If you have ever seen writers' forums or the websites and social media profiles of writers, you will notice how desperate they all appear for a little bit of recognition. Anyone who is even mildly interested in writers (readers, agents, publishers, etc) is so used to writers scrambling for attention that they filter it all out. Self promotion by a writer is often seen as nothing more than white noise by the people who matter. So, you need to make sure that you promote yourself, without looking as if you are trying to promote yourself. Here are some tips for social media to help you do just that.

Set up a LinkedIN profile first

Many people think that their first port of call should be Facebook because it has the most users and is the most popular, but this is irrelevant in your case. You need to appeal to the highest concentration of business leaders, image consultants and media professionals on the web, and LinkedIN is where most of them congregate.

You need to make sure that your LinkedIN profile is viciously professional. This is not a place to show off your personality. It needs to be more of a CV than it does and expression of personality. For a start, you need to list all of your publications, the people you have worked for and the impact you have made on the writing community.

You are going to have to lie on this profile (don't worry, everybody does it). Except that you need to fill it with dull lies. For example, if you had two years of writing online articles and had no real published success, then you need to tell a few lies and explain that your articles were published in journals and magazines. You need to briefly explain how your work was paid for by consultancy firms who pulled apart your work and published it under their own name because you sold them the full rights.

Now it is time to set up a Facebook profile

You need to set up a fan page, and you need to publicize your publications routinely. At least once per month you need to mention your book or other publications. Do not be promotional about it, for example you can upload a quick post about how your book sales reached 1000 this month, or how you have a book signing going on next month. Do not do this sort of thing too frequently, but make sure it is done on a routine basis. For example, make a point of uploading a post about your previous publications once every four weeks.

Use Facebook and Google+ to write for fun

At least once per month, you should write and upload a very interesting article on Google+, and another one for Facebook. Your article needs only to be around three hundred words (do not go overboard). You need to do this for two reasons. The first is because it allows people to see how good you are at writing without them having to read one of your five thousand words essays. The second is to show that you are a prolific writer and that you enjoy writing.

The second point will show people that you write all the time, to the point where you have the time to write articles that are unpaid and that are for everyone to read (which is what posting to social media allows). A prolific writer is far more appealing than a desperate over-promotional one.

These guidelines were shared by Alice Norum, an online editing service writer.