For Our Authors: Social Media Is not Sales Media

I found this article on—guess what?—social media. Twitter to be exact.

A notice of a new follower popped up. I get a bunch of these. Most are people who follow to see if you’ll follow back, and then unfollow. I clicked on the profile to see if it interested me, and I saw that it was about using social media. I follow dozens of such people. I checkout a link, and it was the one above.

Getting to know people and building trust! The more things change, the more they are the same, it often seems. If I ran up to everyone on the street saying, “Buy my book! Buy my book!” I would be unsuccessful.

I would say that one does drive traffic to a blog or other web site through social media. Facebook and Twitter are driving much of our traffic. But a good percentage of that has to be information that’s of value, not just ads and invitations to buy.