Facebook Sharing Connundrum

Have you read the new policies on Facebook?

If you’re like me and have a profile page and a “readers fan” page or other special interest page, you’re probably scratching your head in confusion.

On one hand, Facebook is telling you to post to your network about yourself, your life, etc. For writers, that means, we’d be posting about our daily lives.

But that apparently  is forbidden because we’d be talking about writing our books, reading, publishing, and the pain of promotion, etc. because our lives revolve around all that.

Facebook considers all of that commercialism. That means if we put that on our timeline, our posts might not reach anyone but a fraction of our followers. FB seems to be saying they will censor what goes out from us.

Same thing with our fan pages I guess because it’s hard to separate our writing and our personal lives. They always overlap. Yet, I get emails from Facebook every day telling me my followers haven’t heard from me in a while or asking me to boost my posts on my fan page.

So what are we supposed to say when books are our worlds and overlap into our personal lives? I’m pretty sure no one wants to know how many cups of coffee I had this morning (2 and I’m going to make some more in a minute) or what I’m wearing (still in my pajamas since Darling Hubby left early to go to the country.)

Facebook is trying to get people to network more, like they did back in the day before they started selling our private information so they could rake in even more money. *LOL*

I still think Facebook is a good place to pass along information about good books you’ve read, blogposts you love, information you’ve found, music that speaks to you, and videos that are fun. So go ahead and do that.

What you share may be exactly what someone needs to give their day a lift or make them smile or tell them about a book they’ll want to read.

If your followers LIKE, COMMENT, and then SHARE your post, FB will expose your post to a wider audience according to what I read.

Of course, if you do all that, on every post you read, you’ll spend a lot of time, and time is a scarce commodity for writers—for just about everyone in fact.

Takeaway Truth

There’s a fine line between judicious social media use and a giant time suck. See if you can find the balance you need.