Today we had dinner with good friends of ours, Jon and Colleen (who my clevernesters of old know as my old blogging partner) and the conversation turned to matters of social media. We pondered the pros and cons, wondering about the long term societal effects. Jon, who is an active blogger, tweeter and author, said that he sees tweets as a form of performance art. I completely agree!
It takes a lot of mental work to make a short sentence interesting to a broad audience. You can write a paragraph on facebook which complains about the crappy driver in front of you, or you can show your subscribers why this crappy driver was worth sharing with them. You can create a common experience. You can log in and say, “I’m having a terrible day staying here with my kids in the rain and they won’t stop fighting.” Or you can bring all of the other people who are also lonely and on the edge of running screaming into the sunset to your crazy house for a minute so you all feel less alone. I enjoy the art of writing small, accessible pieces which mirror my life and entertain my friends.
I have been more active on facebook than twitter, and both more than here on the blog, mostly because I get more responses on facebook than anywhere else. I’m a super extrovert who loves to see that my words were received. But I am really reconsidering where I want to spend my efforts writing. We have owned this domain and the content for 5 years. It’s not going anywhere. One day facebook or twitter could evaporate and all of my photos, thoughts and work developing my writing voice could walk away with the platform. Can I break my addiction to comments and focus on writing here? If I link to facebook and twitter so that I can keep my writing here, where it is mine and it’s safe, would the link bring the readers with it? Would I become irrelevant if I don’t use the corporate social media that is so easy for everyone to automatically get my content? Is facebook the wallmart of self publishing? How many more questions can I fit in this paragraph?
Social media and Twitter have killed the comments thread on all but the biggest sites – and, most of the time, the comments threads that survive (e.g. on newspaper websites) would benefit from being put mercifully out of their misery…
But I don’t think the “death of comments” is a bad thing. Blogs are now part of a larger conversation. For me, my blog is still my preferred place for anything more thought-out than a tweet or a quick Tumblr post, and I don’t have a problem with the fact that most of the traffic to each post, and most of the conversation around it, will be found elsewhere – usually on Twitter, to a lesser extent on Facebook.
I had a blog for a brief month or two, and quit because I felt like I was writing to the vast unknown. Or a vacuum. In reality, I think my aunt and my mom read it and that’s it. But if felt weird writing to an unknown audience, or no audience. :)
Do you have a way of tracking hits to your blog? I’m guessing you have way more readers than commenters. I know that I don’t usually comment on a blog unless I’ve been reading it for a loooooong time or if I know the person. Actually, sometimes when my friends post links on facebook to their blog I’ll leave the comment on the facebook link rather than the blog itself. I guess it feels like more of a familiar forum to me. I’ll never have a blog, but I sometimes feel like I need one. I sometimes have an urge to be one of those fanatics who writes a facebook ‘note’ with their personal proselytizing in it. If I ever give into that urge, tell me to start a blog. In the meantime, I’ll read yours!
I took an internet break for the holiday, so I am a comment hypocrite– not even commenting to my own commenters. John, you are right as always.
And Jamie, I use google analytics for tracking readers. I’m not obsessive over it like I was when I was writing Clever Nesting, but I check it at least every other week.