When I started this blog I joined Socialoomph, thinking that it might be useful to me at some point in the future. Having had a look its services and an honest look at my writing life, I don’t think I’ll be using it yet. I registered with the free version; the home page lists the features available for free and those that come with the professional version. The free version features are mainly to do with Twitter.
As I’m still much more of a listener than a talker on Twitter, I don’t feel any need to use this. As far as I can see, some of the people I follow use this, or a service like it, to schedule their tweets so that they are dripfed to followers. Obviously, this is extremely handy to keep your content moving through the twittersphere, or at least it is if you have plenty of stuff to tweet. I’ve been a bit slow and choosy, so most of those I’m following are interesting to me, but I’ve noticed that some people seem to do not much more than tweet lots and lots of quotes. Quote after quote after quote. Interesting enough, some of them, but a bit irritating if the tweeter’s name isn’t @dailyquotes and it’s not what followers are expecting, particularly if some of the quotes start to recycle after a couple of weeks. I do follow one writing quote person, but that was okay as the clue was in his Twitter name.
Please, if you’re thinking about joining Twitter, think well in advance about what you want to do there and how much you are going to be tweeting. Actually, no, that would be a bit prescriptive, and it’s not what I did at all. But if you’ve had an account for a while and find yourself wanting to dramatically change the style and frequency of your tweets - especially if you suddenly want to bombard them with quotes - then be clear about it for the sake of your followers. Set up a separate Twitter account. Tweet your followers about it and invite them to follow the new account as well, something clear like ‘For hourly inspirational writing quotes come follow me on @mynamewisdom’. Then your followers won’t be surprised or irritated.
Socialoomph offers other services in the professional version, clearly useful if you generate lots and lots of content and want to keep your profile high across a variety of social platforms, but it’s not for me at the moment. I did flirt with the notion of creating a bicycle quotes persona on Twitter, but to be honest I’d rather be writing or cycling or walking in the free time I have.
Incidentally, if you do like bikes and quotes, here’s a couple of sites: http://www.quotegarden.com/bicycling.html and http://www.theargonauts.com/coolquotes.shtml
And my favourite at the moment, which might apply to writing as well:
‘It never gets easier, you just go faster.’ Greg LeMond
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