Yesterday I read an article entitled, “Why I killed my social media accounts (why you may want to too…)”, by Linda Formichelli. Prior to quitting social media, Ms. Formichelli had subscribed to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin (the usual suspects).

In her own words, “I got to wondering — are there any activities in my work life that I don’t really need to be doing? Activities that are crowding out more important tasks that will have more of an impact?
An obvious one to look at was social media. It’s like a monster that you can never feed enough.”

A few days ago I published a fun piece where I wondered if social media wasn’t killing my writing career. http://lindamims.com/2015/11/02/will-social-media-kill-my-writing-career/  I don’t plan to quit social media, but reading this article, gave me some time to reflect and decide why I use social media and what I want from it.

It’s true that of the 40 or so retweets I do daily for my followers, only one or two retweet my comments each day. Most of my followers, I fear, use me to build their numbers and to make themselves look popular. That’s okay if we have that understanding, but I have greater expectations from a special few hundred of my followers.

I belong to a writers group that boasts more than 600 members. I joined because together, we could be much more effective and impactful for each other, if we took a moment to get behind a club featured author, book, or event. I knew that we could launch a resounding, ‘what the hell happened’ that could rock social media. So far though, we never seem to rise above 8, 14, or 36 (at best, for most) RT’s per post.

I have found that less than one-sixth of the members pause from their own marketing and promoting to see what the big picture could hold for us all.

Ms. Formichelli puts it best, explaining that she prepared for a tweet chat which was hosted by a large media company. It was promoted by the company on their social media sites, on the company’s blog, as well as on her own blog .

In preparation for the chat, Formichelli wrote questions for the host, and planned her answers in 140-character increments. In other words, she took a lot of time out of a busy day to prepare a great presentation, but at the end of the hour-long chat, Google Analytics showed that:
“THREE people followed the links in my tweets. Three total.”

This is similar to what happened to me during a recent blog tour hosted by the large book review club I was telling you about. In September they held a Book and Blog Block Party tour. Of the 600 members, 39 showed up to my site. I, in turn, left a comment on every blog that participated and if I missed anyone, it couldn’t have been more than one. In truth, not more than 100 of us participated at all.

Life is important. Family, friends and good times are wa-a-ay more important than social media and yet we neglect them to pursue every avenue to get the word out about our product. We spend hours honing our craft, and we waste a lot of time worrying about why others aren’t reciprocating to make it work for all of us.

Yesterday, I tweeted the following: I am glad that I write, blog, and tweet just for me. Luckily, I added #amwriting. That hashtag attracted two people who I don’t even know. They liked and retweeted my comment. The two other RT’s came from my book club of 600.

Read Linda Formichelli’s post at: http://www.therenegadewriter.com/2015/10/27/why-i-killed-my-social-media-accounts-why-you-may-want-to-too-and-what-to-do-instead/