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deletedDec 10, 2022Liked by Ramona Grigg
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I ventured onto Twitter in March and it has been totally irrelevant in terms of helping me build a following. That said, the people I know there - all of whom I met via Substack and Medium - are great and I enjoy engaging with them.

All in all, I've decided to stick with Twitter and have accepted social media will not be a key pillar of my online personality. If Twitter dies or becomes too toxic, I'll happily jettison it and go back to being social media-less altogether.

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Dec 6, 2022Liked by Ramona Grigg

I used Twitter back when I was working in IT. It was great for spotting nationwide Internet outages before the monitoring sites — the geeks would be posting "Hey, anybody else having connectivity problems?" and it was usually easy to tell when there were problems out the. Since retiring? Twitter was just annoying. I quit last month, basically because I see no need to give Elon my membership for free so he can use it to sell ads.

I still use Instagram, although the TikTok-clone videos and more frequent ads are starting to get to me. My wife loves FB and uses my account. 🙄 Otherwise, my "social media" is Medium. I am not part of the Medium Partner Program, because I don't want to be one of those folks always kvetching about getting paid (or not), but I do love the interactions with other writers on Medium (the real writers, not the listicle generators).

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So. I’m in all the places. I find for the most part the investment it takes to grow my audience for my fiction and essay writing makes it a real time suck. I don’t have time to be “engaging” all day and my work is more pensive than trendy, which makes it all the harder. I feel like you need a name before you build an audience which is hard to do with my kind of writing.

For my news publication, though, building an audience has been super easy. Such a clear USP that I don’t have to ask people to join. They just do it because I’m offering something no one else is.

All that said, Substack (and Medium to a lesser extent) has been the best avenue for audience building and growth. I’m not saying I have a huge following, but (a) I enjoy it, (b) i offer something that readers seem to enjoy, and (c) people on Substack are here looking for unique things to read.

If I could turn social media off and never use it again, I would. I hate how I need it to do my (self-employed) jobs and how so many organizations that help me with family things are only available on Facebook. I hate the time suck and the brain pollution.

At the same time, I’d not be where I am in my news business and career if not for these outlets. So I have to be careful not to complain too much.

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I'm increasingly of the opinion that we don't really need social media to grow our audiences. I used to be highly engaged on several social platforms, until I realized it was a) costing more and more of my sanity, and b) not giving me much in return. I quietly walked away from social media at the start of the pandemic, and my mental state has markedly improved since then. I also found far more clients through referrals, introductions, and cold calling/emailing than I ever did on social media (yes, even LinkedIn).

Since starting my Substack, I've begrudgingly started to use Twitter again, but I've scaled even that back to just the bare minimum to appear active. In my experience, Twitter is a terrible source of traffic, and it hasn't generated many subscriptions (to say nothing of paid subscriptions). My biggest boosts in traffic have come from partnerships with other creators, and being featured on the Substack homepage. Even now, almost all of my growth (which is slow, but steady) comes from recommendations from fellow writers.

TL,DR; Social media takes far more than it gives. Strategic partnerships have worked much better for me.

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I ditched Twitter a month ago, after Elon Musk invited Trump back into the fold. But that said, I hadn't used Twitter since 2018.

Social media for me is mostly a social outlet. With Facebook I actively socialise on my main account. My business account is about to be closed down as it has little use (my fault).

Love Instagram - finding likeminded folk who share my own interests, and enabling me to promote my backlist a little (but I'm not good at that). But not really that 'social'.

Pinterest is good too - not socially, but as I write often from visual stimuli, I find Pinterest helps me create mood-boards which I can in turn use, to promote a novel.

Substack is probably the most intellectual fun I have had in a long time though, and I'm gradually building a list of wonderful weekly reads as well as 'meeting' some fabulously erudite and nice people.

When it will all come tumbling down is when we are forced to pay for all these amazing digital 'talk' services. In the current global economic climate my socials would disappear very quickly...

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Sigh. I've been on the major sites — Facebook, Instagram, Linked In and Twitter — to varying degrees of "success" if you could call it that. But I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall trying to get some traction somewhere.

Example: Over the past week, I shared a series of Substack posts that look at the aftermath of a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. Five of the six pieces are profiles that tell the stories of key individuals in the district; the sixth is a wrap up focusing on "unfinished business." The reach of the shared posts on all platforms was minuscule — as in 2 to 4 percent of my total followers on those sites.

In some ways, this was a surprise given the number of people I know in and from the area as well as those who work in public education. And these are compelling stories that deserve to break through the algorithms and the bots.

As a freelancer, I don't have the money to pay to market my work. It really is dependent on word of mouth. I realize social media platforms are designed to keep you on the platform, not going off to other places to read information, and these types of shared posts seem to have less and less traction these days. I get it: They want you to purchase advertising even if you're not trying to sell something, but it's still disappointing. (These posts — and my Substack, for now — are free.)

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All of this. I love Twitter. It has helped me find my people. I can't say it has done much for my writing audience, but it has served so many other purposes. I like Post. It will never be Twitter, but maybe that's ok. And being on the ground floor might actually help my writing audience there. But I'm still hanging out on Twitter until it's not tolerable. I don't have the following to worry about trolls 🤷🏼‍♀️

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"I’m not the only one who is just now realizing what a treasure trove Twitter is, now that we’re in danger of losing it."

Amen, Ramona. It is a treasure and it's very painful to watch it writhe under the thumb of its new overlord. It is a treasure, but it doesn't give over its treasure easily. The main thing I learned about Twitter over the past 7+ years is that it takes work to make my time there worthwhile (lots and lots of work.) You must stay focused and engaged with those you follow and those who follow you. You need to read their posts, comment, offer suggestions, and support, reTweet. Support their causes. Buy their kids' middle-school band candy.

Twitter rewards attention, generosity, and patience. It is exactly as civil or uncivil as the people who post there. And if it dies I'm going to miss it sorely.

Has it affected the way I write? I'm sure it has--everything we consume as readers changes and enlarges the way we write. If it weren't for Twitter I wouldn't be here on Substack.

And as for your description of Mastodon? omg, spot on.

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Ramona thank you for trying all these platforms so I don’t have to!

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Still not sure what to do. I've joined (but not yet posted on) Mastodon, signed up for Post, and signed up for Spoutible (from Chris Bouzy). I'm on Instagram but rarely use it. I have to do a lot of posting on Twitter and LinkedIn for work, so those are the ones I've gravitated to. It feels daunting to do more than that, so I'm hanging tight on Twitter for now. We'll see how it all shakes out.

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I basically loathe all social media. I use Linked in and Instagram, both sparingly.

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I once read that "one email subscriber is worth 100 social media follows." The math isn't exact, of course, but I find the spirit of the statement to be true: Deeper connections matter more, and owning your connections is key.

I found that out the hard way years ago. I used to run a satirical website (a discount version of The Onion), and managed to grow a nice little audience, much of which was driven by my Facebook page. I used advertising to gain a portion of my fans, but my engagement was organic. Then, the dreaded algorithm change. Overnight, I lost the bulk of my traffic. I now had to pay to reach my own fans. I tried to find other ways to reach them, but my site was essentially dead in the water without shelling out not insignificant funds to reach them. That was the first time that reality struck me: I didn't own those connections.

Add to that the clutter and glut of short-form content, intensified by digital tribalism, and you ended up with a lot of social media fatigue. I think that's at least partly what led to the rise of podcasts and, later, newsletters. LinkedIn seems to be one platform where you can still achieve decent levels of organic engagement, but that'll change. You can do that on Twitter too, but it just feels like a Sisyphean effort.

That's why I gravitate toward platforms like Substack (and, once upon a time, Medium). I feel like I'm really engaging with people and not just liking posts.

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