How To Use Social Media as a Writer

Audience analysis - getting to know your readers - is one of the first strategies that a non-fiction writer employs to ensure the writing meets their needs and expectations. And what tools we have now, like no other time in history, to get to know our readers. With the Internet and all the social networking tools available, the data about your audience is searchable and findable. Want to find out what gardeners or foodies are excited about this season? Just go to their favorite message boards like GardenWeb or Yelp and search and read for a while. Are you a technical writer who needs to know the top questions being asked so that your documentation can pre-emptively answer those questions? Go out to your customer support forums and browse through the most popular asked and answered questions.

My favorite story of getting to know your audience comes from a group of technical writers on Tech-Wrl, a long-standing writing community and mailing list. In this case, the audience was from two different demographic groups - a teen-aged son and his mom both racing each other to find the answer to a particular iPod problem. His first choice for the answer? Searching through videos on YouTube, naturally. Mom, an expert in online help herself, chose to go to the Apple site and search through the manuals to find the answer. Both found what they were looking for in the same amount of time, and could fix their iPod problem easily with the right information.

By getting to know your audience where they "hang out" online, you can write more accurately to their needs, better predict precisely what information will help the most, and learn how they like to get their information. All these tactics give you better, fine-tuned writing abilities to deliver the right amount of information in the preferred deliverable.

How to Listen to Readers

Your target audience not only has online communities where they like to talk with each other, they are also using specific words and phrases. Google is not the only search engine in town, when it comes to listening specifically to conversations, though. Forums, mailing lists, blogs, and microblogs are rich with content that typically involves people talking to people through text.

For example, Technorati is a well-known blog search engine. To get started, go to technorati,com and enter a phrase in the "search the blogosphere" field. Google provides a blogs-only search engine specifically for looking through blog entries by going to blogsearch.google.com. Comments in blog entries often contain complex, multi-layered conversations.You can subscribe to specific searches receive notifications when a new conversation occurs around the keywords you specify.

Twitter, a microblogging service, offers a search service at search.twitter.com which searches for keywords in real-time. Real-time search offers up-to-the-minute results of posts directly after they have been typed into someone's iPhone or Blackberry (or any smart phone or web browser). This type of search offers an amazing opportunity for writers to learn more about their readers instantly. Journalists are using Twitter to reach out to find the story before anyone else and also report the news as it happens.

One additional method for getting to know your audience is to use LinkedIn to look up several job titles of people who will read your work. You can search through profiles to find the people who are most likely to read what you write. This technique has been a fascinating way to get to know the users of software products. 

Beyond listening

Once you are comfortable with listening, and feel you could be a true community member or contributor to the conversation, feel free to start talking back to your audience. It's nearly always better to offer assistance or service before demanding information. Think of this next step after listening as your introduction to the community or the people who are your readers.

Social media offers many ways to join in the conversation. You can start by writing comments on other people's blogs, by talking to others on Twitter, or by writing your own blog and linking to other's blogs.