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Trying to set up an online presence for your group or organization? Here’s some basics to think about.

One: Include a blog on your website that has new content on a regular basis.

This first step is key to a better social media presence, because it influences your search engine rankings. Better search engine rankings draw more traffic to your site, as do good keywords, and if your blog features information about the group, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have the appropriate keywords.

Establish realistic criteria for “regular”: daily? weekly? biweekly? What can you actually expect to do?

Figure out how you will generate such content. Some suggestions:

• Group member announcements, interviews, and guest posts.
• Group events and news.
• Posts drawing on other social media, such as announcements of new videos on the Youtube channel (see point 4) or Pinterest boards (see point 5).
• Calls for volunteer positions and interviews with volunteers.
• Yearly best-of lists or review columns.

This blog should drive the group’s presence on social networks. Posts should automatically propagate to other networks, thereby relieving the pressure for someone to be managing and posting to individual streams, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as presenting a more unified and consistent approach.

As you may know, the effectiveness of Facebook as a social media platform has recently changed for those of us who don’t usually pay for it but maintain a social media presence in order to publicize ourselves.

Many of Facebook’s changes affect fanpages. Think of a fanpage as a tiny website hosted by Facebook. Companies could create one in order to have a presence on Facebook, and their fans could go click “Like” on the page. You have one in the form of your author page. Here’s mine, for example.

The model for interacting with fans has been to post messages, which appear in your fans’ newsfeed. They respond by commenting and liking and hopefully by clicking on links in order to go buy your book or listen to your podcast or read the interview or blog post or whatever.

It’s hard to find a good overview of what’s happened, but it boils down to several things:

• There are indications that Facebook has changed the algorithm by which EdgeRank determines what posts show up in users’ newsfeed.
• Items show up in the newsfeeds of users who are mostly likely to comment or otherwise interact with them. Some feel that destroys the value of a fan page by as much as half.
• Facebook’s changes are intended to increase their revenue by forcing advertisers to promote posts.
• Getting advertisers used to Facebook branding and then starting to charge them may have been Facebook’s plan all along.
• People using Facebook will need to adjust to the changes in one way or another.
• Facebook wants people using the Reach Generator tool or paying to promote posts.

So I wanted to test out the changes for myself. Like most writers, I use social media to sell books but also to brand myself, spread news of upcoming events, etc. I also teach online classes, so I try to sell those as well. I had just announced a couple of new ones, so I figured I’d use that post for the test.

After I’d posted something, I clicked on “Promote this Post” to see what was involved, and saw it’d be $7 to promote. Wotthehell, as Mehitabel would say, and look, they even took Paypal.

One reason I’ve been a little dubious about all this is that in August I tried advertising on various social media (Facebook and Twitter) and search engines (Bing and Google) as well as on Hope Clark’s newsletter. I did see a lot more traffic on my site, but I don’t know how much of that translated into sales of books or classes. Overall, the newsletter, which was the cheapest, was also the most effective.

And, not to my surprise, here again it didn’t make much, if any difference, even though when I looked at Facebook’s results for my promoted post, I’m told, “Promoted posts stay higher in news feed to help people notice them. So far, your post has had 113.8x as many views because you promoted it.” That translated into a total of five visits clicking through the Facebook link yesterday. Five.

And that’s my point. Like most writers, my Facebook fan page just isn’t big enough for me to worry about this much. I’ll keep maintaining my Facebook presence, but I won’t spend money on advertising there but find most effective places. I’ll also make sure I don’t confine my social media activity to Facebook but use Delicious, Google+, Stumbleupon, Twitter, and Tumblr as well.

My advice for writers is not to waste money on social media advertising but to work on their blog and attracting readers through good content.

Enjoy this advice on social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

So one of my resolutions, post-Confusion, was to be better about social networking and spreading word of my projects. Towards that end I’ve been posting scraps of the WIP on a daily basis (and plan to do so until it’s done or someone buys it), doing more writing for the SFWA blog (just finished up a review, and I’ve got interviews scheduled with authors Myke Cole and Jason Heller) as well as a series I proposed on Thomas Burnett Swann for the Tor.com blog, and — in keeping with my belief that one of the best ways to promote yourself is to promote other people — trying to mention interesting stuff on various social networks.

So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.

I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.

Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.

One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?

And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.

Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.

What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?

Enjoy this advice about social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

More links from the Blogging 101 class, this time dealing with Facebook and Twitter.

Mentioned in class:
Facebook news ““ allfacebook.com
How to Stop Facebook from Posting Recent Activity to the News Feed – http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-recent-activity-2010-01

As part of the Blogging 101 class I just finished up teaching for Bellevue College, I organized a bunch of my links into a handout. Here is the General Social Media Resources section.