Oh, My Gosh! Do I Even Recognize Social Media Marketing?

According to Watch for These 2026 Social Media Trends by Lacy Phillips at Jane Friedman big things happened in social media while I was working in the kitchen or meditating, doing a little yoga, or going for a walk. It's kind of unrecognizable.

I am of the writing group that needed to be careful about social media use. We're those people who aren't big enough to hire professionals to handle our social media for us, so we have to be careful about how much time we give to it because we're actually working at something else. 

Give this some thought: comic Leanne Morgan is supposed to have got her big break, because she hired some guys to do some social media marketing for her, not because she did it herself. She was writing material and performing.

For the average, more or less, writer, whatever we're doing for social media is never enough. Or, at least, it doesn't stay enough for long. We started with blogs in the '90s, then went on to Facebook, then went on to Twitter then side stepped to BlueSky. By that point, it was obvious that whatever you did wasn't going to be that useful for long, so you needed to think long and hard about what you did next because you knew you couldn't expect much.

I went on to Pinterest instead of Instagram, because I wanted something I could use for archived images and material from Original Content. Instagram appeared to be only for new material. That probably was a mistake. I don't think Pinterest has been that useful for me (though I did do it to collect images of clothes for characters I was writing about), but it's probably too late for Instagram. 

I was able to wrap my head around a few of the things Phillips wrote about in her Friedman article.

What I Might Be Able to Use from Phillips' Friedman Article:

• Write about yourself, not just your work, across platforms. I find this to be a crap shoot. Maybe you have to post about cooking without wheat a lot to get some attention? On the other hand, it's true that on Facebook my hundreds of friends are usually unmoved when I post about a new publication, but a core group comes out for travel and cooking pictures. Also, I posted an apron question on Facebook yesterday and got some good responses. Posted the same question on BlueSky where aprons evidently don't exist and no one understood what I was talking about. I'm not sure how much time I should be spending on writing about myself across platforms, even though I don't have that many platforms.
• Use keywords instead of hashtags. Aren't keywords hashtags without the hashtag?
• Pinterest is supposed to be coming back somehow. As I said earlier, I'm already on Pinterest, so I added an objective about working with that to my 2026 branding goal. I had been thinking for a while that I should do something there about my Medium publications, anyway. I should at least watch this movie on the subject. It lasts a whole hour!