I Came Late to Instagram

Instagram has been around since 2010. I joined last year at the urging of one the other artists in the painting workshop I attend. She has--at last count--1351 followers on Instagram. I have 270. Clearly, I'm not quite getting the hang of this wildly popular app, though I do enjoy it. I am fascinated by the gorgeous photos and while I find the proliferation of hashtags annoying, there are some people who actually write lovely prose or poetry to go along with their pictures, but those folks are rare. Mostly, it's photos and hashtags.

Nevertheless, if there were no hashtags, finding anything on Instagram would be impossible. And, as it turns out, hashtags can help when it comes to attracting new followers. I discovered this fact at http://www.wikihow.com/Get-1k-Followers-on-Instagram, which is a good place to learn how to work Instagram. I am studying it carefully and intend to become more daring with hashtags.

I doubt whether getting more followers on Instagram will help me sell books. Selling books is tough. Still, to me the one big advantage of Instagram is the ability to share a photo from there to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. In the case of Twitter that is a huge plus because it is nearly impossible for me to stick to 140 characters. I am, after all, a romance writer.

If you're on Instagram, please follow me @marzecpenelope and like some of my pictures. I'll do the same for you. :-)

Twitter Spring Cleaning

I have already written one post about Twitter. You can find that post here. This post is about keeping my Twitter account tidy. I have spent the last week or so--at odd moments--cleaning and organizing my Twitter account. This was a well-overdue project. There are websites that will manage Twitter accounts, but I decided to go it alone. I was raised in a do-it-yourself household and then went on to marry a do-it-yourself husband. I believe I can do it better myself.

Here and there as I went through my daily tweets I unfollowed people who were not following me. Many of them were rich and famous. It felt good somehow to hit that red UNFOLLOW button and remove the high and mighty from my feed. I have realized that there is no point in following famous people. If someone is following 14 people but has 50,000 people following them, they are famous. Why should they follow me? They probably only follow their siblings or perhaps their lawyer.

For the famous people, it is better to add them to a list. (Because, of course, I still want to read their tweets.) You do not have to follow somebody to move them into a list, but once they are on the list you set up you can read their tweets as your leisure. Your lists can be private or public.

Once I eliminated the famous people who don't follow me, I had more spaces for new people. Twitter will not allow anyone to follow more than 2,000 people until they get more than 2,000 people following them. I was stuck at around 1,600 followers for the longest time--until I decided to do something about it.

Now I have a very different Twitter feed. It's like a breath of fresh air--like opening the windows when the weather turns warm. :^)

I also discovered there were people following me who had not posted anything for three years or more. While it's nice to have a lot of followers, it's far better if they are chatty, live people. (It takes a great deal of skill to be chatty in 140 characters but there are those who do it well.) If someone has not posted in three years, I have to assume they passed away or gave up tweeting, in which case they should delete their account and try something else--like maybe Pinterest or Tumblr.

At any rate, I should have been cleaning out my account all along, but like everything else it was just going along and collecting dust bunnies. Now I feel so organized!

Have you checked your Twitter account lately?