Day 4.3: Using Social Media for Business

When I first started my work as an editor for ComicBooked.com, I was told of the vital importance of social media. In today's world, that's one of the best ways to get across to people. Use Facebook, use Twitter, use StumbleUpon and Reddit--in fact, most of you reading this probably discovered this blog from one of those sites. It's vital to have accounts and share your work as much as possible. But like everything else, there are ways to abuse it as well as use it.

There are two ways to go about social media if you want it to benefit your business--either use your own personal account or open a new one. If you use your personal account, you already have many contacts who are personally interested in what you invest in. Your family and friends are interested in you, and it's easy to share with them to help get the word out. But there's also a problem: people tune out if they get bored. If you're too enthusiastic, if you post about your business or site constantly, people will ignore you or (even worse) get annoyed with you. This can be avoided easily if most of your posts remain fun and personal, but it's easy to forget that. When I was starting out at my editing job, I started focusing largely on Twitter I posted every article I wrote, and almost every article I edited, onto Twitter. I tried to put on some regular posts as well, but I didn't have enough interesting things to say to keep up. Before long, almost every post I made was just advertising articles. I began to lose followers. When I went to look up which ones had left, I found the names of some of my own friends among them. I was heartbroken. Why were my friends abandoning me? Why didn't they like me any more? I was horrified as I realized what had happened. I was spamming them. I was sending unwanted notes to people over and over again, and my personal life had all but disappeared. They had no reason to follow me, and now I was harming my own work.

I was thinking earlier about new ways to publicize this blog. Twitter came to mind easily, but I didn't want to make the same mistake. I decided to take a different path. I got a new account for this blog, under the name of @onlineincome19. I have to start building a following from scratch, but this time I'm going to look for people who are interested in saving and earning online. I'm not going to post only links to articles, but also share bite-sized tips and links to sites I find helpful. I don't know how hard it will be for me to find a good balance for Tweet content, but I think that at any rate it should be better than my last attempt. I'm also considering starting up a Facebook page, but one thing at a time.