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| Photo courtesy of Intersection Consulting |
Keeping Busy and Life Separate
One of the tougher parts of using social media to build your own personal writing brand is keeping your family/friends and general personal stuff out of your business. For me, I use Facebook for personal and my Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn accounts for business. This helps me keep the two very different parts of my life separate.
What's a Platform?
In the publishing world a platform is simply your own sphere of influence. The larger your own personal sphere, the more appealing you are to publishers. Imagine if two people sent in similar writing proposals - one who had 5,000 Twitter followers and the other with 50. Who do you think the publisher would be more interested in publishing with, all other things being equal?
The goal of using social media is to build your own platform. You don't want random people as your Twitter followers, for example. You want people interested and engaged in the same topics you write about. A well-built platform gives you strong influence so that when it's time to publish something, you have your own group from which the product can be launched.
Social Media and Platform Building
My process involves posting every article I publish onto the various social media sites. Anytime something gets published, I tweet about it and let my followers know. Relevancy does matter, but this is mostly about getting my work out into the world and showing people that I can write and that other people are willing to publish my work.
In a later post, I will talk about ways you can get out there and get your first pieces published by someone else. For now, the key is to understand that your social media sites are part of the backbone of your audience.
Blogs and Platform Building
Yes, you can certainly build your platform writing your own blogs. But do you regularly check in on a blog for their latest news, or do you check your Twitter/Facebook feeds instead? Most people rely on being told about an update rather than actively search out new information.
Case in point, I subscribe to email lists (another platform tool) that send me updates on my favorite sites. I read through the updates every day or so and go read the articles of interest. This saves me a ton of time that I would have spent going to each site and looking up their most recent articles.
So definitely write your own blog, but understand that the purpose of the blog should be to drive social engagement - a far more efficient and effective means of engaging your platform.
Reminder about Your Audience
To be a professional writer means you know your target audience and write in a way that interests and engages them. So, as you build your own platform, remember to keep your target audience in mind. Don't go out and build a following of a bunch of other writers. It's useful to be engaged with peers, to be sure, but remember that they're also your competition in many ways.
Build the right platform with the right people and you'll start leveraging each and every article you publish - whether that's on your own blog or on some of the most high-profile publications in the world.
