Rethinking Self Promotion

I don’t like to blow my horn, but they say you need to self promote to develop a following for your creative work.

Over the last couple months I used Twitter to promote my stories and films on Twitter. Every day I would post a couple of tweets with a link to a story or film. I also post stuff on my blog, MySpace and FaceBook. My FaceBook page is the most successful of these from what I can tell.

It is difficult for me to tell if this promotion is working as well as it could.

Over the last couple of weeks I read a few articles on the internet on self promotion: Social Minefield: How To Self-Promote Without Being A Jerk for example.

One of the bits I read was that if you want to be effective at self promotion, don’t self promote all the time. Keep your self promotion to about 20% of what you post. I’ve modified my promotion plans to do that. I still need to come up with other stuff to post. I do post links to interesting sites. I have a huge collection quotes I could share. I’m not that keen about saying much about myself personally. It feels to egotistical.

Ideally anything you post should get people to think “I want to share this” and send it off to a few friends. If what you are promoting is not interesting, then no amount of promotion is going to work. My more successful posts usually do well without promotion. I suspect that I should put more effort into improving my material than promoting.

The articles I read suggest that you ask people to pass your stuff along to their friends. I don’t really want to do that, but I will.

Please Please Please, share this post with your friends. ;-)