The Digital Crafting of Me

With my last post, I shared a few of my disorganized thoughts and experiences on forming a digital self. This post, I'm going to explore some of my methodology for hopefully crafting said self and maintaining sanity IRL (In Real Life).

First, some guidelines you should consider:

1. Don't Spam You know this one and I know you know this one because every writing blog worth its salt mentions this at least once. Basically, you are what you post online. So, if you post nothing but advertisements for your next book you risk becoming a cardboard cut-out or a billboard. Don't flatten yourself.
2. Keep it Reasonable Don't just make a million accounts, thinking you're going to get a million followers on each one. In order to have an online presence you kind of have to engage in the community. You need to reblog, retweet, like, share, and comment. If you have too many accounts you won't be able to keep up with all of them; you'll be spreading yourself too thin. Instead, have relevant media accounts and ones you enjoy engaging with. Sometimes that does mean opening a few different accounts on different media sites to figure out what works for you, and that's OK.
3. Don't Replace Writing with Social Media You probably know this already, but it always bears repeating. Tweets don't write your book (unless you're writing a collection of 140 character stories). Readers want to read, first and foremost. Your tweets, blog posts, and status updates might help them get to know you, but remember that what interests them in you are the worlds you create, not necessarily what you ate for lunch.

Now that that's clear, I can get into what I do to manage my social media. Keeping in mind, of course, that this is what works for me right now. This might not work for you, or even for me in the future. It's always up for evolution:

1. Schedule Social Media Time Every day I sit down at my computer and spend one hour - no more! no less! - on managing my social media. I take a few minutes checking notifications and crafting responses. I read blog posts and comment - maybe even sharing them on Twitter and Tumblr if I like 'em enough. This keeps me engaged with everything, even when I'm not promoting. Especially when I'm not promoting.
2. Sync Accounts A lot of accounts let you automate cross-posting between them. This saves a little bit of time, while boosting community engagement. When your accounts are synced you can share across multiple accounts at once, enriching your content and expanding your social media footprint. For example, I use this to get photos on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr all at once without having to re-upload. I can also post my blog posts to these places and when I reblog something on Tumblr, Twitter can get in on the fun too. It's a useful feature. However, I do NOT recommend this for spam-like posts (see guideline #1).
3. Have Consistent Profiles This is something I've been recently working on. I try to have the same pictures and descriptions on my profiles. The content shared changes with each account based on the medium, but my avatars are mostly the same. These similarities are how you know you've found me. I like to keep myself consistent. The most variability I have are "personal" and "professional" versions of my digital self - same as IRL. For example, my personal profile picture is me with a banana peel on my head, while my more professional portrait is cleaner, more polished, and of a general higher quality.
4. Organize Your Links I have all of my author-related accounts in one folder in my bookmarks. This way, I can just open all in tabs in Chrome and get moving. This works for me because it helps me keep my accounts straight, and make sure I'm engaging in all of them. If I find myself frequently closing the same tabs without engaging in a particular site, I reconsider keeping the account active. With this method, I can make the most of my limited social media time.
5. Have a Hub OK, this is something I need to work on myself, but I already have a plan, promise! Most social media sites give you a place to input a link to your home page. In an ideal world, this would be your central website (www.you.com). For me, right now, this slot flip-flops between my blog and my Facebook author page. However, it would be much more beneficial to have one, neutral place to list my different profiles as well as any further information about me or my books - a one-stop shop for everything me!

And that's it! That's my whole plan for social media management in a nut shell. Social media is important, but it's more important to be authentic and engaged. However you choose to do that, I applaud you. It's difficult to make a digital self out of 1's and 0's.