On my Twitter page, I remember that I was boasting recently that I’ve managed to integrate all of my social media platforms. The idea behind that is to make sure that I have an active stream of material on those sites, updated regularly, in a way that is relatively easy for me to maintain.
A bit of background is in order. I first joined Facebook about nine years ago and have been tooling around with my personal page ever since. I did not mess around with Twitter up until I got back into journalism and joined the staff of my local newspaper back in late 2013. I did that essentially to make sure I was able to communicate easier with sources, help break stories, etc.
Taking the advice of others that it might be more prudent to have separate work and private social media presences, I created a Facebook page, Liegois Media, and a Twitter handle by the same name in addition to my personal FB and Twitter accounts. I use the private Facebook account all the time; my personal Twitter, not so much. The media FB page and the media Twitter account got the amount of use I was expecting.
Once I left journalism again, I was left with two social media sites that no longer served their purposes. Instead of letting them die, I decided to repurpose them as pages that would concentrate on my interest in writing and writing-related articles and media. The use of these pages was sporadic, at best. Even as I began to pick up some steam with my writing, I didn’t really have a handle on how to make use of them that well.
To paraphrase the US Men’s National Team soccer coach Bruce Arena, sometimes you have to try stuff out. For me, this came in several steps:
- I discovered Hootsuite as a way to post on multiple platforms simultaneously. It was also the first time I had ever discovered the concept of scheduling posts ahead of time. Although it had potential, its limit on the number of platforms you could use simultaneously and keep it free, as well as other factors, limited its usefulness to me.
- After despairing of daily posts on my FB writing page of my talking about writing, I decided, why not do reposts of articles, images, and memes about writing that I had read and found interesting? I decided to do more of that, and my activity on that page rose.
- I eventually learned that I could schedule posts whenever I wanted, so I could look up a whole bunch of posts and schedule them days or weeks in advance. Right now, in fact, I have posts lined up for the Facebook page for at least the next two weeks. (I’d later start doing fun theme days as well.)
- I notices how many writers have their blogs to do longer-form writing, as opposed to just posting articles, quotes, random thoughts, and memes. That was the genesis for Liegois Media here on WordPress.
- Now I’ve started to figure out how to link media so that posts on one site can be linked on others. I’ve paid attention, for example, to how Wil Wheaton does his social media. From what I can tell, his Twitter page serves as a communications hub. He has his blog for the longer posts and think pieces, which then is fed to his Twitter page, and his Twitter page feeds into his Facebook page.
Essentially, Blog -> Twitter -> Facebook.
Since I’m a little more comfortable with the Facebook platform than Twitter, how I’ve linked it up is slightly different. My flow chart would look like this:
Wordpress Blog -> Facebook ->Twitter.I’m not going to get into exactly how to get all of these linkups going. What I wound up doing was getting curious and looking up the help pages for Twitter and Facebook to make it happen. (It was pretty easy to get my WordPress blog to post other places.So, that’s how I made things a little easier for myself on the social media front. Oh, and today I just link my personal FB posts to go on my Twitter feed, so that place won’t be as dead as it usually is. Fun times.
[EDIT: Apparently I can’t link my personal page to a Twitter page and a Facebook page under that same account with another Twitter page. If anyone can show me how this would work I would appreciate it.]
Liegois Media 