Anyone who’s overwhelmed by social networking, raise your hand.
I know my hand’s in the air!
I'm on facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I have a blog, and I recently signed up for Digg and Stumble Upon. I joined a site called LiveMocha to learn Chinese and realized afterwards that even that came with its own international social network.
It’s important for writers to learn social networking tools and skills because it helps us connect to a writing community and market ourselves as writers. But it can be very time consuming, a little confusing and sometimes overwhelming. Not only do you have to maintain your own sites and profiles, but you have to read other people’s posts and status updates, comment on them and find other ways to interact online.
Who has time to do all of that?? Although I enjoy social networking, I often become so engrossed in it that I don’t realize two or three hours have gone by.
I have found a very useful tool that has helped me by allowing me to organize all of my social networking venues on one screen…which saves so much time. With all of them on one screen, I don’t have to keep switching from site to site to post and/or search for new information. It’s all there in one glance of my computer.
iGoogle is Google’s customizable homepage on which you can add all of your favorite social networking tools and RSS feeds as well as other applications like news and games. I have Twitter, facebook and Blogger lined up beside each other at the top of the page, followed by the RSS feeds of major blogs I follow. It’s great! It saves so much time and I'm staying better informed of the happenings of other writers, agents and editors.
Here’s a short video by Google explaining how easy it is to use iGoogle:
If you check out iGoogle and like what you see, you can start organizing your social-networking life today!
What are some other methods you’ve used to organize your social networks?
Written by: Anne Greenawalt is blogging, facebooking and tweeting.
I use HootSuite to organize my FaceBook and Twitter posts, and set them up in advance, so I can keep my day job!
ReplyDeleteWriting content for the web has its challenges, as I've found over the last year! For resources on writing for online audiences, check out http://bit.ly/aefomn Email me if you want to chat about writing!
I find writing is really rewarding in so many ways and it's probably why I'm willing to stay up so late doing it!
I've tried iGoogle, Netvibes, Twitterdeck and a few other things and find that I dislike them all. Mainly because I'm a bit allergic to having too many information sources blinking at me at the same time. I like to find information when I want it, not get it pushed at me. (The main reason why I left Google Buzz in a huff after two days).
ReplyDeleteWhat I've done is setting up my web browser to always display the 8 tabs I depend on on startup. This way I always have what I need but avoid the cluttered window of iGoogle.
I use Bloglines to keep up with most online things I read on a regular basis (woe you if you don't have a feed going, I'm not going to read you). I have tried a few other feed-readers like GoogleReader and Alesti, but prefer Bloglines.