Alphabet 2020 - S is for Social Media

I have been thinking a lot lately about social media and blogging, how they interact, how and where I want to spend my time, and more. That's a lot of thinking.

There are so many ways for you to interact with other books lovers I don't think it is even possible to attempt to keep up any more. There is also a lot of ways to catalogue your books, with more emerging every day.

Let's start with the big three:  Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  In theory, I am on all of those, but you couldn't really say I am fully present on them, at least from a book blogging perspective.

I have recently started a Facebook page for my blog and I am really enjoying that. I try and remember to share the links from my posts there although I am sure that there must be a way to automatically feed  links from here to there. I know that you used to be able to do that to Twitter, but that doesn't seem to work anymore, so I need to figure that out. On my Facebook page I also share all sorts of other random book links there as they capture my interest, and I follow several other book bloggers too.  In addition, there are book clubs, book groups, publishers pages and so much more, but the thing is that I don't often read the book club books because I have enough to read without adding another "should read" book to my pile.

I do spend a bit of time on Instagram, but to be fair it is more about non book related things, so there are lots of pictures of cakes. I need to figure out how to put up interesting look blog related content, without it just being a screenshot of the blog post because that just looks a bit boring. Having said that, I don't have the decor, accessories or the imagination to do pretty book posts, especially since most of my reading now is on Kindle which is a black and white screen!  I also never really got into the #bookstagram thing either, even though I am aware that a lot of publicists love Instagram and Facebook for reviews now, rather than the traditional blog reviews.

I have been on Twitter for years, but I really don't do much on there, certainly in comparison to the early days. It really is just my page updates from Goodreads and sometimes an image from Instagram, but not all of the time. I think if I want to use it for images, I do have to go to Google and upload the image rather than just pushing it from Instagram because you just get a link rather than an image doing it that way. I also need to make more of an effort to go on there and share my blog content. I used to spend a lot of time there amongst the blogging community but now when I am on there I feel like I am talking to a void. I used to always post something on Twitter and have it automatically flow through to Facebook. I was all for those types of automated tricks but it doesn't seem to do that anymore.  I am aware that it would feel less like talking into a void if I was more active and more invested, which is true of all of these things. The more you put in the more you get out, but how do you decide where to put in when there are so many options.

Another place where I am somewhat active is Litsy. I do enjoy Litsy but I don't always update there, and again, its hard to make every single book picture look interesting when it is of my Kindle front page.

Finally, from a purely social perspective I have joined a group on Discord, which is another way to chat to people with similar interests. It is popular in the gaming community so maybe it will take off of as a book thing too. Right now, the group I am in is super super busy so I am not sure I have the time to keep up and participate.

I am sure there are many, many more places that we could be talking about here. Even as I was just about to post this I realised I haven't mentioned podcasting or Youtube. There's a whole community of Booktubers out there that I am not really connected to. And are there book communities on Snapchat and Tiktok? Is Snapchat even still a thing? I don't hear much about it anymore. Even if there is I would have no intention of joining either of them, but I am still curious.

You'll notice that I haven't yet mentioned Goodreads yet, and that's because I am going to cover the book cataloguing sites separately.  I have been a member of Goodreads since 2009 and it is just a part of my reading experience. Every couple of days I go in and update my reading progress and when I finish a book I add it to my spreadsheets, and then I go to Goodreads and mark it as read. If I write a review I do put part of my review there and then link back to here but I am not sure if I should just copy the whole review over there and not worry about linking back here.

The thing is though, there are other options out there. Many years ago I had a Librarything account but I haven't been there for years but I guess it is still a viable option, especially seeing as Librarything now own Litsy. Just this week though I found out about two more sites that could have potential. One is called Bookhype and the other is Storygraph.

Bookhype's tagline is Never Miss a New Book Release and it says that you can log your books, see upcoming new releases, add new books in a series to your library and more, which I have to say does sound promising.

Storygraph is currently in beta, but from what I have seen of it is another book cataloguing site. but it's points of differences are that it gives you targeted recommendations and that you can easily access lots of stats and graphs at the touch of the button. I do love a good graph and statistics, so I think this is the one that I will try for now. Actually I did play with it a little bit and I really like it so far! The graphs are fun to play with! For example, this is the mood graph for all the books I have just imported into it.

My thinking around these different options is about the practicalities like if I decide to start with one of these other sites, is it replacing Goodreads, or does it become in addition to it and therefore becomes another place that I have to remember to update going forward.

The key to all of these things is trying to keep a bit of balance between blogging, visiting other people's blogs which I think is important but time consuming, spending time on social media, work, life and, oh yes, still finding time to read. And throw in there the fact that we are talking about doing some work related study and that is even less time to do everything. Except for today. Today I am going to be playing with Storygraph.

How do you balance this? How do you manage with all the different social media sites? Are you interested in all of these new sites? Are there other new sites that we should be checking out??

I'm not sure if I have come up with any answers by putting all these thoughts in writing, but maybe it will help clarify my thinking a bit. Oh, and if you are interested, click on the socials links on the right to follow me at any of these sites. Depending on which one you click you may or may not see lots of content! I think I am Margreads on just about all of them!