How do you convince the internet to read what you have to say? Do you need a witty, attention grabbing title? Do you intersperse your posts with gifs to keep the interest of your audience, but wonder if your audience will actually read what you’ve posted instead of just scrolling through the pictures? Do you have original and concise content? Even if you follow all of these dos and don’ts for a perfect post, that doesn’t mean you’ll have one. There is so much more to blogging than just formulating your research and thoughts into something that someone can understand, and much of that has to do with marketing yourself on social media sites.
I’ve been an ardent boy-cotter of social media since high school. I condemned facebook and twitter as time wasters, as little personal pockets of narcissism that were secretly fed on mobile phones like virtual mini-human tamagotchis by their creators. I constantly assured myself that I wasn’t missing out on anything and that none of those profiles had anything to do with me or my endeavors. Now I’m realizing they do.
Especially being a part of the art world, social media is a tool that I’d be dumb not to use. Not only are platforms like Facebook and Twitter useful for networking, but also for self marketing. The quickest and cheapest way to reach readers is to link my blog to Facebook. When I advertise my post on social media, I have 500 potential readers just because I have 500 friends on Facebook. Sure, not all 500 will read this post, but my 50 friends who write might. There’s a web of feedback, a flock of readers, just sitting at their computers WANTING to read something… why can’t it it be something you wrote?
Columbia College Chicago Archives 