Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Other Platforms

What about StumbleUpon, Instagram, Digg, Reddit, Storify, and others?

I’m not stopping you from going to any of those. But you will have a harder time of it. Nearly everything (Pinterest seems to be the exception) I have discussed previously can be managed from either Hoot Suite or WordPress or both. This means planning. It means scheduling. So you can optimize your efforts. Feeling inspired? Write 50 blog posts if you can or want to or have the energy. Got time? Use Hoot Suite’s scheduler and get the next months’ worth of posts scheduled on your various platforms. Want to spread your blog to Twitter or Facebook? All you need is the right WordPress app. 

But those others are going to often require either buying a Hoot Suite app or just doing it all manually, or, at the very least, even more of a split focus. Although Reddit does offer a Hoot Suite button, you still have to go to the site in order to use it, and it’s only to share Reddit content on Facebook, etc. and not the other way around. It’s not impossible but it does make your life a bit more difficult.

Social Bookmarking and Discovery Engines and the Like

I would suggest the occasional one-time post on places like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit (and possibly also Delicious), as these are sites where people can find interesting links. If you deposit your links there, they might get some traffic. I do get some brief traffic whenever I post on StumbleUpon, but it never seems to be sustained. For sustained traffic, just like everywhere else, you will need to participate in the true give and take of a community. 

Too much dumping of links, though, on any of these sites, and you’ll be accused of spamming. 

These are perfectly good communities, and if you want to join them, no one’s stopping you. But personally I’ve had trouble getting traction on any of them, and they demand time that I’ve found is better spent elsewhere. Perform your own personal time cost-benefit analysis. Maybe some or all of these will work for you.

Storify

Storify is a means of aggregating and ordering your content from several social media sites. It might work for you, as the orderliness could work in conjunction with the order of your actual works on Wattpad. The Hoot Suite Storify app is free, so it’s worth a shot.

Instagram

Instagram is another site for sharing photos and also short (up to 15 seconds long) videos. Note that it does convert images to a square shape. The Hoot Suite Instagram app is free.

Flickr, Photobucket, and ImageShack

These are all photo hosting sites. Only Flickr is supported by Hoot Suite, and the app is free. I personally use Photobucket; I find it to work faster and more reliably than ImageShack. About the main reason I don’t use Flickr is because I’ve been using Photobucket forever and a lot of my work is hosted there. Moving it would mean breaking a ton of links, and I am loath to do that.

Use Your Time Wisely

For any of these additional sites, like I said, a time cost-benefit analysis is in order. Personally, I feel time is best spent with a blog (and a separate website, if you want to create one), Twitter, and Google+, and with a Facebook author page if your work warrants it. YouTube is (to my mind) good for occasional work or to support any of these others or even to support Wattpad postings. Pinterest and Tumblr are good as extra places to post and maybe post less frequently, say, one-third to one-half as often as on Twitter, the blog, etc. The remainder, I feel, should be worked on far less frequently. You just won’t have the time to manage everything, even with WordPress and Hoot Suite, and write, and live your life. 

But check your metrics on Google Analytics. If Reddit, let’s say, is giving you a lot of great, sustained traffic, then by all means spend more of your time there. 

The link is to the Star Trek Sub-Reddit. The image is from Delicious. The YouTube video is a good short instruction of how to submit on Reddit. 

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