This month I’m celebrating a birthday. No, not mine! What are you thinking? I turned 39 in July, and I’m not ready to turn 40 quite yet. đ
What this month marks is one year of blogging, tweeting, pinning, and goodreading, although my computer tells me that’s not a word. In one of my earliest blog posts, The Secret to Social Media, I wrote about my initial reactions to each of the following four sites, and in this post I’ll tell you what’s changed a year later.
Then: As a writer, Iâd forgotten the pure joy of expressing emotions solely through visual imagery. With Pinterest, you can create boards that reflect the things you care about, and you never have to say a word.
Now: Yep, sounds lovely, but Pinterest was the one to go. I still have an account and I’ll probably revisit it sometime, but it’s just not possible to juggle five or six social media accounts. I knew this going in, but I figured the one to fall would be…
Goodreads
Then: What I love most about this site, so far, is I have one place to list my âto be readâ books. Now I can collect all the scraps of paper, sticky notes, and electronic lists buried in my phone and shelve those titles in Goodreads.
Now: For a long time, this was all I could do on Goodreads. The problem is that it’s not a user-friendly site. But on January first, I resolved to read a book each week for 2014. Goodreads came in handy for this resolution because of their Reading Challengeâwhere you publicly declare a reading goal for the new year. Anyone can view your progress. That was the motivation I needed to stay on task, so I dug my heels in and learned how to navigate the site. Now I truly love Goodreads, and I’m only three books behind my goal.
Then: This was supposed to be my favorite, because thatâs what everybody says. I do like Twitterâthereâs something about the immediacy of it thatâs freeingâbut itâs confusing.
Now: Surprise! Guess which social media site is my favorite? Twitter did take time to understandâin fact, it would be months before I caught on. But once I got comfortable jumping into conversations with total strangers, I met some amazing people. Most are generousâTwitter is all about sharing and discovering. Many are also fall-down funny; I’ve laughed myself to tears on more occasions than I can count. The only downside is that it can be a distraction.
Blogging
Then: My personal favorite. This has been a shockâI worried about the time it would take to blog, I worried no one would read my blog . . . now I know itâs about perspective.
Now: I admit I’ve lost that perspective several times. There’s no question that blogging can feel frustrating because it is time-intensive and once in a while seems as though you’re talking to yourself. To ease that frustration, I made some adjustments:
- I no longer spend several hours on each post. Yes, I did that. Those early posts were drafted on Mondays and heavily edited throughout the week, then published on Fridays, which could take all morning.
- I stopped worrying excessively about typos.
- I started posting less frequently. In the beginning, I posted weekly, but twice a month works better for me and I actually get more visitors that way. I think you have to give people a chance to miss you. đ
One great thing about blogging is looking back on old posts; it was sweet to read the first oneâwritten a few days after I received my contract. I was so unsure of what lay ahead: I didn’t know what the book title would be, or what the cover would look like, or when it would get published. All I knew back then was a dream had come true, and that was enough.
Oh, and the secret to social media? It hasn’t changed: give yourself permission to have fun.
(See the original post HERE.)
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