Socially Circulating Writing Processes
As someone who has developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with social media, I was hesitant to share ideas from my writing process on various platforms for a couple of reasons. My primary concern was that sharing something that is often equated as academic might not align with the content that my friends and followers would typically expect of me, which might call the authenticity of my online persona into question. Furthermore, I find it increasingly difficult these days to engage a wide audience of friends and followers to produce notable results of any kind, regardless of what the content may be. That said, I figured I would create posts for Twitter and Facebook and try my best to create them in a way that would invite the largest audience possible to engage with them.
As you can see, with my tweet I attempted to cast a wide net by using some universal and simple hashtags like #writing to see if I could reel in anyone outside of my typical follower base to try and increase visibility. I also searched for a visual aid that I felt reflected the kinds of tweets that come off as informative, academic and inviting. Unfortunately, my tweet only garnered around five likes, and no comments or responses. However, the Facebook post was another story.
Within the same amount of time, my Facebook post received 16 likes and ten comments, which is objectively more successful compared to my tweet. I attribute this engagement to a number of relevant factors for consideration. For one thing, I think Facebook is more inviting to discussions on subjects that carry more depth and consideration. Exploring one’s writing process is a subject that I don’t think bodes well when character limits are imposed, as they are on Twitter. Furthermore, I think I might have been able to herd in more engagement by sharing something personal about my writing process through the image of my room and my personal ruminations on the importance of location and motivation from things I’m passionate about.
An additional factor I attribute to the success of this post is sympathy. As you can see, most of the people who commented on my post are people very close to me: my sister, my girlfriend, my roommate, my girlfriend’s roommate, some fraternity brothers, etc. Most of these people know that I am a WRD major, and likely inferred from my subject matter and lack of profanity that this might have been connected to an academic assignment of some kind. While some people chose to answer honestly and seriously, there were also posts that were sarcastic and poked fun and the seemingly rigid kinds of responses one would expect from this kind of post. However, sarcasm aside, I am satisfied with the results of my efforts.
