My digital artefact is a WordPress blog on writing, and accompanying Twitter posts. I was wanting to connect with other writers for networking so I decided to make a blog about writing, as well as participating in the writing community on Twitter.
Originally, my project was just going to be focusing on promoting my blog but I decided I wanted to focus more on the blog itself, so I halved the load between promotions and posting to the blog. This means that my original plans to post to Instagram were cut and I relied fully on Twitter for promoting.
Based on my research on writers and writing blogs, I decided to focus on tips for writers, as that was most useful for writers to want to read. Inspiration for my blog were other writing blogs such as Paper Fury and The Creative Penn.
I chose to connect with writers on Twitter using various hashtags encouraged by Meg Latorre in their article ‘5 Ways to Increase Your Online Presence as a Writer’ (2016) (now deleted), as well as other tips I got from Ana Melendez in ‘The Importance of Building Your Online Audience Before Publishing Your Book‘ (2019).
A method of production I used to ensure I was tweeting each day to maximise exposure was by planning my tweets at the start of the week. This helped me to stay consistent with posts to Twitter.
At the start of the semester I was making blog posts and got zero feedback. I quickly learned that I needed to promote my blog so I took to twitter to do this, where I started to get feedback on my tweets.
The use of hashtags helped me reach a wider audience of writers, particularly #writingcommunity which is a popular hashtag used amongst the community on Twitter. However, this only helped me gain more Twitter followers and likes, but not much more feedback on my blog, where I only got one like on one of my blog promotion tweets. This made me think that since I got more likes and follows just sticking to Twitter, Twitter is where I should be posting my points, rather than creating an entire blog. I can create threads for longer points or just short and simple tweets to get across any ideas I have that I might share in a blog.
References
Latorre, M, 2016. ‘5 Ways to Increase Your Online Presence as a Writer’.
Melendez, A, 2019. ‘The Importance of Building Your Online Audience Before Publishing Your Book‘.
Candace 