Social Media Awkward

I haven’t been posting on Fridays because I don’t want to, usually. I need my Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays to be an irresponsible college student who is almost 30 and still single as crap. I had a sudden worry the other night that maybe Fridays were the best day to blog ever and that I was missing out on some awesome Friday people who liked to read blogs by almost 30 year olds on Fridays. I thought I’d try a Friday out, maybe just once. In an effort to not let Fridays get too crazy and super serious, I thought I’d talk with you guys about my blogging and social media strategy. You know, because I care.

I’ve mentioned on my blog before that I’m extremely socially awkward. Social media makes being social easier for me, but sometimes my awkwardness still spills over into my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Let’s face it; I don’t get an awful lot of traffic on my blog right now. This is a “personal blog”, so if you’re reading this you’re probably either a close friend, someone I know from college, a family member, or one of the people I’ve managed to be successfully social with on social media, probably Twitter. Twitter is something that I try to take as seriously as I take this blog, but not in a content producing way, more of a micro social way. I share my blog posts on it throughout the week, respond to my mentions and replies, and like the occasional tweet from people that I follow. If I really like a person or someone’s tweet, I’ll reply to them, too. My only real rule I self-impose onto myself is that I try to keep my Twitter free of naked men and clutter. I write the occasional serious thing that I try to get published, and I put my Twitter username in the top right of my cover letters to the literary journals that I submit my stories to. My Twitter is kind of like a potential second impression to them, maybe. But the fiction that I submit to those literary journals doesn’t have much to do with this blog. This blog is a separate thing entirely; nothing on here is ever resubmitted to any lit journals. Usually lit journals don’t like that anyway. Fellow writers who submit to lit journals, you all know this. For nearly a year, along with the occasional once a month post on my blog, I tried to Twitter my way into a lit journal somewhere, and that’s what my Twitter was.

So recently, I started blogging on this blog a lot more frequently. I kind of magically realized that I also needed to use Twitter to find and engage people who read or who may want or read my blog about, I don’t know, a gay dude in Louisville who writes things? This blog promotion element has taken priority over the lit journal second impression thing. Still, no nakedness, though. Totes profesh. Also, I try not to spam-tweet the blog posts, at least not in the same day they go live on my blog here. I tweet them once, right when they go live here, and then I don’t tweet them again until the end of the week. Because I don’t normally blog on Fridays, Fridays have become the day I’ve deemed it okay for me to tweet my blog posts again to pick up some more traffic for them. Needless to say, Twitter has become my go-to social media network for promoting this blog thing. I really like Twitter. I know it’s struggling right now with growth, but I’m not too worried about its longevity. I’m meeting some awesome people on Twitter and I hope to meet a lot more. You can follow me on Twitter if you want. If you’re super intimidating on there, like with a lot of followers or with a verified check mark or something, or if you have an important job, or if you’re really cute, I might have a hard time interacting with you at first, because I’m shy and socially awkward. But yeah, follow me. Twitter is cool.

And then I thought, Instagram could work, too. And it does, a little. I mean, I don’t know what the referral link looks like on Google Analytics when someone clicks my blog link in the bio, but I get likes and stuff when I post photos of random crap that I do throughout the day, because, I don’t know, transparency? I don’t treat my Instagram as professionally as I treat my Twitter, because it doesn’t bother me that I don’t and I’m okay with that for some reason. Occasionally I go shirtless. Sometimes I make goofy faces. I’m not a photographer. You can follow me on Instagram if you want. I’ll only be intimidated if you’re cute.

Since I’m talking about Facebook acquired things, I also started a Facebook page for my blog. You can like me on Facebook here if you want. I really just post links to my blog posts on it. I don’t really care for the Facebook page method with my blog. It’s too, I don’t know, not like it used to be when I did enjoy reading and interacting with Facebook pages. Also apparently there’s some hubbub about their algorithm and the way they promote your pages that people don’t like unless you pay for it, which isn’t a good choice for me, not yet anyway. So, the Facebook page is there, and I schedule my blogs to post links to it, and maybe one day I’ll have enough traffic to justify paying to promote the page more.

My blog is a “personal blog”, which to me really just means that I can blog about whatever the hell I feel inspired to. Many people on my Twitter and Instagram timelines have revealed that they use Snapchat, so I recently started to try to figure out how to use Snapchat along with my blog as well. I hated it at first, but I’m getting the hang of it. I like how direct, personal, and one-on-one the interactions can be. It’s like good customer service, only cooler. You can add me on Snapchat if you want. You can view my story and I’ll send you stuff, maybe. I’m the opposite of totes profesh on Snapchat. I snapchat random things on my walks to and on campus or when I’m out and about in Louisville. Sometimes I go shirtless at home and snapchat that. A few times I have complained about how tired I was and made faces and hand signals that were apparently very sexually suggestive.

I’ll be seeing what works and what doesn’t with this social media stuff over the next few months. For now, I’m going to make plans to go see Batman V Superman later today. Let me know in the comments below if you think me blogging on Fridays will be of any use to you, maybe a Friday post about something related to my blog itself like this one. Again, feel free to follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and add me on Snapchat to follow along with my awkward adventures off the blog.