I’ll be honest – I don’t really make much of an effort to watch my language when I post on Twitter, even though I actually do with most of my writing projects. With the exception of Just Laugh and occasionally, but not often, this blog, I don’t really swear in my writing because I want it to appeal to the largest audience possible.
I guess I’m a bit more lax about Just Laugh because I’ve always considered it to be targeted at an 18+ audience whereas my humor column, etc… are read by all ages.
I also post a lot of off-the-cuff political commentary on Twitter – usually filled with lots of frustration – whereas by the time I’m ready to write an editorial about a topic, I tend to be more reserved and thought out at that point.
And sometimes I wonder if this is all a bad thing – if I’m doing myself a disservice by using Twitter like this instead of a more “controlled manner” that would be less alienating to anyone who might find me through social media and have an interest in something that I write … if only I didn’t have such a potty mouth on Twitter! 😛
The thing is, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t exactly use social media like other people trying to promote a brand … and maybe that’s a separate problem. While I do share links to my new columns and articles when they go up, I just as much use Twitter to share random findings that amuse me or even just talk to myself, in addition to commentary on posts that I find that aren’t substantial enough to make into full-blown blog posts.
…although for what it’s worth, I’m trying to do that more when I find that I’ve got more than a handful of tweets to say about something…
That said, it’s certainly something that I think I want/need to dig deeper into in the future as I work to gain some new attention for all of my writing efforts … it’s constantly getting more complicated to drive traffic to long-form writing with so much focus on social media, but I know that I can’t completely ignore it altogether and expect similar results by just doing my own thing.
Plus, admittedly I can see the appeal of an image focused specifically on my brand – namely, if I want to be the writer known for humor, and Disney, and parenting content, and occasional in-depth political commentary, it does make sense that my social media profiles should center around those topics and maybe steer away from angsty rants every time that Donald Trump says something undesirable … especially because lately that has pretty much been every single day anyways!
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For what it’s worth, though, if I can manage to avoid all of the Trump-inspired Twitter rants, do you have any idea how much time I should save?! Maybe I could actually keep up with this newfound writing schedule of mine if I watched my tongue on social media a bit better! 😉