Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Maggie the Social Butterfly


The title for my post is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I'm not overly gregarious, even on the internet. However, I knew that social networks were important, so I gradually tapped into several of them.

My first social network efforts were on MySpace and Shelfari. I didn't do much with Shelfari, but through time, my usage and friends at MySpace multiplied like bunnies. I didn't go all out with killer graphics like many people do. That's just not me. I'm more of a just-the-facts kind of girl. Somehow I managed to get music and a slide show on my MySpace. At one time I had several Winnie the Pooh characters but the codes gorped up and now they're gone.

I learned about Authors Den from someone and signed up for that one. Mostly I have a presence there and not much else.

Then came Facebook. I got into Facebook slowly. But in the last six months, my friends on Facebook have grown exponentially. I like the twitter-like feature that provides an update for friends. I try to leave an update there once a week, but I'm not always consistent.

After that I heard about Ning and Goodreads. I signed up in several Ning groups but frankly I don't participate there at all, other than having a single on a Ning page. Goodreads was an addiction for awhile. I amassed a lot of "friends" there thinking it would be a great database of readers. It is that, but it is unwieldy to send a message to all 500-plus friends. Still, I go out there at least monthly to update my bookshelf and to post reviews.

I also decided to use my MySpace blog as a consolidated repository for various blogs I write. That gives me a weekly entry there, and I see that I have blog viewership each week. I've sent out bulletins on MySpace promoting various events, online and in person, with limited success.

I didn't sign up for Twitter. I can barely keep all the rest of this stuff straight.

My website is where I get the most bang for my buck. Lots of hits there. I'm still pumped about the content, still can't believe I actually have published books. (Nobody wake me up from this great dream!)


Maggie

No more networks is my new motto!!!

2 comments:

LK Hunsaker said...

Ahh, it does get to be mind-boggling, doesn't it? I have so many that are now just sitting because there are only so many hours in a day! We all need assistants. ;-)

Hywela Lyn said...

I think so many of us are in the positiion of having sites jsut 'sitting there'. I do find 'Twitter'quite useful actually, because you cn just post a line or two about, say a new release, and it will not only show up there but can be used to 'feed' to other sites. It only takes a few seconds that way. I certainly wouldn't use it as a blow by blow account of the mundane events of the day like some people do, but each to his own!