Authors Electric

Social media fads come and go. Step back in time ... remember MySpace? There are kids now who never heard of MySpace. Google+ was going to be the next big thing and the predicted demise of Facebook had people scrabbling for footholds on Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon and goodness knows where else. Now everything is becoming a bit blurred in a whirl of social networks, blogs, photo collections, discussion forums, online chat and update feeds. Isn't this all too much? So, why bother with Twitter? What is the point of a 140 character message which might not get read by anyone before it sinks into the 500 million daily tweets? On the face of it, unless you are looking for personal interaction or are a microblogging wizard and manage to get your tweet to go viral through retweeting or on TV shows, Twitter doesn't seem to offer much. Unless you are a blogger. Content is the key to good blogging. Some folk blog about their daily life, others   about ...

Authors Electric recently dipped a toe into Triberr. This was followed by screams of anguish about the mysteries of RSS, and how to find the correct URL to enable the RSS feed. So, first of all what is RSS, and what is it needed for. Well, I’m no expert, but I’ll share what I know. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is an easy way for web sites to share headlines and stories from other sites. For the purposes of Authors Electric it is needed to ensure that the members who have signed up for Triberr, can share their blogs with all the other members and their followers. It is immensely time consuming to search for and visit each blog in turn by traditional methods using search engines, however, by using Triberr, the blogs come to the members through this portal reducing the need to go searching for them. By visiting Triberr once a day, or once a week, or whatever schedule suits, you will find all the other members blogs are gathered together in a list. This list...

How to get more people to read your blog posts using Triberr Over at Ruby Barnes my blog has been running for two and a half years. In that time I’ve had around 183,000 page views across 161 posts. After a hesitant start I found my pace with several different posts about life observations, the writing process and first experiences with social media. But my carefully crafted posts fell upon deaf internet ears. I was shouting in the wilderness, like a mad preacher. Big excitement when five people looked at my blog in one day. It seems like a lifetime ago. A man named Harvey Thomas once said “If they haven’t heard it, you haven’t said it.” (He was the guy who advised a budding politician named Margaret Thatcher to lower her voice by an octave. What if he hadn’t?) Harvey's truism was shared before the internet was widespread but it summarises what social media is all about i.e. sharing messages you consider to be worthwhile is necessary to reach your audience. At time...