Social Networking for Promotion

Last night, I was on the Social Networking panel at Penguicon. There were some interesting ideas brought up for how to effectively use social networking to create relationships with potential readers and to just interact with cool people who have similar interests.

While most panelists make use of the well-known Facebook and Twitter, as well as maintaining a personal blog, here are some other tools you may not be familiar with.

Goodreads is a social cataloging site that allows you to register books and share your reading interests with others. As a writer, it's fun to let others know what you're into and see what other writers/editors are reading.

Scoop.it lets you create a personal dig site and crawls the web for content related to your topic of interest. You can then scoop the best ones to put on your personal web page. Scoop.it is currently in private beta and you can get a free invite.

HootSuite, among other things, lets you update multiple networks at the same time, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Ping.fm

It was also suggested that becoming an active participant on forums related to your topic of interest, like writing, helps create relationships with others who may then start following your posts on other social networking sites.

To keep things fresh on your blog, consider inviting others to do guest posts and perhaps ask to write a post for someone else's blog.

If you read a blog you really enjoy, analyze what that blog author does that you like. You can do it to!

The consensus on the panel was that it's important not to try and use every social networking tool available, but rather to pick a few and try to do them well.

I hope you enjoyed my summary of the panel and maybe learned something new. Happy networking!