#SocialNeworking Do's and #Marketing Don't's

"Don't's" -- Is that right? That doesn't look right.

ANYWAY, I'm fairly active in Social Networking, and I've been paying attention to why I follow/friend/add some people and not others. Here are some insights I've gathered (about myself, anyway). I'm a writer and a reader with a pretty wide range of reading tastes. I'm also a people junkie. My advice, then:

Interact appropriately. If you visit a blog and leave a comment like "So true!" or "Wonderful" or "Good post", you might as well be a spam commenter (or, as I call them, a spommenter). You may have a hundred posts you want to read and drop your name on, but take a few seconds to make it personal. I'll even allow spomments if the spommenter takes the time to make it personal. Spommenters are people, too, you know.

If you comment on a Google + or a Facebook post or on a Twitter tweet, be nice (even if you disagree) and make it be about the post, poster, or previous commenter.

If you leave a link anywhere, pick ONE. Make it a live link. That means, if you type or cut-and-paste a link to your blog, for example, type it like this:{a href="http://MarianAllen.com"}Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes{/a} -- of course, with YOUR URL in place of mine, the name of the page you're linking to in place of my blog description, and replacing the { and } with < and >. When you click whatever button it takes to post your comment, your link will be pretty (showing only the description) and clickable (making it easy for interested readers to follow it).

Add value. If you find a nifty site, share it with your social networks. Even if it's something you, personally, aren't interested in, if it's something you know from reading other people's posts that they're interested, share it. Share calls for submissions to markets outside your genre but in the genres of others in your network. If a lot of your Pinterest network loves boats and you come across a boat blog somehow, pin pictures from it just to please them.

Give first. Retweet other people's announcements, blog posts, and good news. Some will give back, some won't. Don't keep score. As my mamma always says, Just worry about your own behavior. Other people won't be keeping score for you; at most, they'll be watching you give and thinking well of you. It's even better if you really do like the people and products you're boosting. :)

Join cross-promoting teams. This is particularly good for people who hate to self-promote. One I recently joined with happiness and success is Writers4Writers. Each month, two or three writers are chosen and we promote the heck out of them! This month, Laura Eno and I were The Chosen Ones, and I not only got the benefit of mass promotion, I met a lot of wonderful people/writers who were new to me.

Join blog hops or challenges. April A-to-Z is one, challenging you to blog every day but Sunday in the month of April, each day focusing on a letter of the alphabet. The one I'm doing now (for the first time) is Story A Day in May. So far, I've written 21 short-short stories and posted them on my blog. Again, I've gotten some happy promotion and I've met some writers/people I'll follow and treasure.

Don't forget to market! When it's appropriate, go on and say something about something you wrote and leave a link to it. Maybe the conversation has come to involve zombies and mules, and it would be perfectly appropriate for you to leave a link to the book of short stories you self-published that contains such a story.

Marian Allen
Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes