OK, you want to hear something weird? Someone already created a Facebook page for me!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eve-Golden/106155636081917
It was not me! I have no idea who did this or how to access it, and it is a little freaky!
What’s freaky is the silhouette they used. It’s like Alfalfa, all grown up.
A profile account is what you create if you register via the homepage screen. A fanpage is what you’ll create if you start here
Someone loves you. Since you didn’t make it, you don’t have editorial access or control of it. Just make your own page. Especially if you use a nice looking officialish photo, people will gravitate towards your page.
It’s the default no photo selected FB silhouette.
Actually, my hair kinda *does *do that if I don’t attack it with a blow-dryer and hairspray every morning.
Thank you! A project for this weekend, when I am supposed to be doing some freelance editing. Have to see if I can import all my book covers onto my page. I wonder what “wonderful person out there in the dark” created a Facebook page for me?
OK, I set up a Facebook page, as an author–thanks for all the tips–and now have to figure out how to “friend” people and link to other sites, and make it *not *look like a pathetic piece of crap that a middle-aged auntie set up.
This is a very good explanation of tumblr. I’d seen other tumblrs and didn’t understand the “reblogging” and found it confusing and made me feel old. But I was telling a friend how the promotion I’d been trying for my paintings website hadn’t been working very well. He recommended tumblr because he thought my paintings could fit in well and be liked.
Once I signed up and could view things through the dashboard rather than from the outside it did make more sense. I just started my tumblr two days ago, but I’m putting a mix of my paintings along with other cool art stuff I find since I’ve seen some other artists do the same. Though if anyone has advice on how to improve my tumblr or how to best use it I’d gratefully listen.
Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook all don’t necessarily require a large time commitment. If you join any of them, you want to updated them regularly, but it doesn’t have to be a lot each time. I think tumblr will work for me, since it doesn’t take much time for me to post a link to one of my paintings, and doesn’t take much more time to find other cool art stuff by other people to reblog or post. Twitter didn’t work for me because it was difficult for me to think of what to say, but since you are very witty I think it could work for you. And also you’d have every SDMB member who’s on Twitter following you immediately.
Awwww! I am going to work this weekend on trying to figure out Facebook, and think I will put the others on the back burner. I do want to link my page to sites–such as this one–and will ask my publisher for tips on how to promote my books, while still being entertaining and not too obnoxiously hard-sell.
That’s probably good going to your publisher for tips. They should know more of what works and doesn’t for promotion, especially for writers. There is also a lot of advice on the internet for using Facebook and Twitter for promotion, but there’s so much advice you’d end up spending hours a day if you followed it all.
Already my friends are telling me, “Well, you did this wrong and you need to do that, and it’s the wrong kind of page and . . .” I miss the 1980s. Hell, I miss the 1880s.
OK, I suspect that may have been the wrong thing to do. I started my page and e’d all my friends (I mean friends, not “Friends”) and they flocked to my page–and now I am unable to “friend” them. One of them told me the fanpage was the wrong move, I need a *personal *page, so I can communicate back with people, and that now I have to go back and re-register and start a new page from scratch and piss off all the people who came to my old page.
I hate Facebook.
I have a hard time believing Tumblr will take over Facebook. They are completely different entities. Tumblr is just a blogging service. Despite the descriptions above, it doesn’t really have any social networking features, other than the basic Web 2.0 stuff that every blogging service has. I’ve rarely seen a Tumblr that has any actual personal information. IN fact, most people I’ve seen try to hide their real life identities. The community there does not attempt to integrate with real life in any way.
If Tumblr ever does replace Facebook, it will be because social networking as a concept is failing, or because Tumblr adds actual social networking to their system. And I predict that social networking is more like instant messaging: a concept that didn’t exist at first, but, now that it does, it will never die.
Not that this means that Tumblr isn’t useful for advertising purposes, of course.
Oh, and Eve, you should be able to like and respond to people as your company, but you might also need a personal page so you can set yourself up as an administrator. That page can itself remain essentially blank.
That may be TMI even for your most dedicated readers.
Wait, are you setting up a page to promote your books and your writing? Then you need a fanpage. Are you setting up an account to find high school friends and plan get-togethers? Then you need a personal page. You can certainly have both but most people find it helps to keep their personal and public lives separate if they have a fanpage for anyone who likes their work and a smaller private personal page for real life friends. I know at one time, FB capped friends at 5000, which I realize you probably wouldn’t bump against but I think it’s a bad idea to make a personal page for a professional purpose. I am unsure what you mean communicate back with people. If you go into Manage at the top of your fanpage there should be options to turn messaging and wall posts on or off. Basically, you can set a fanpage to have all the functionality of a personal page while still allowing you to maintain that separation of life and work.
Reading that short bio made me wonder if you are familiar with the work of the printmaker Ann Chernow?
Not sure who you’re responding to with this, but I wanted to clarify that I at least never meant to insinuate anything like this. Tumblr is very different from Facebook and I wouldn’t say it is a replacement at all.
My impression from the OP was that Eve isn’t actually looking for social networking of the sort that Facebook is best for, she’s looking to promote her work. Facebook has tools for that but in my opinion they aren’t really that great and they only work if the people administering them are already in the flow of the platform - witness the difficulties she’s having.
As for “Tumblr as a social network” I don’t really have an axe to grind, especially because I’ve only been using it for a few months. As I see it though, it does facilitate multi-level personal and semi-anonymous interactions on a different level than say Blogger or Wordpress. Many/most of the users are anonymous or pseudonymous but the interactions are there.
Well, if there’s anyone the Dope will take care of in terms of social web 2.0 presence, it’s our Eve. Fear not, its what I’m saying.
Why not find that young techie at work and give him two shiny nickels to set up your Facebook page for you?
Yeah, turns out I am not *nearly *famous enough for a fan page to be of any use for me, so I took it offline and cancelled it. Now I have to decide if it is worth the trouble and energy to start a personal page and re-invite everyone I had invited to my insurmountable fan page a few days ago.
Eve, I think having a fan page to promote your books would be the right thing.
One of our local food bloggers has this configuration (and he’s only written one book, so far):
Blog (you could substitute tumblr here): https://breakfastwithnick.wordpress.com/
Facebook fan page: Breakfast With Nick
I think you could easily get a whole lot of “Likes” on a fan page just from your friends right here. It also helps to keep your private and public personas separate, in case you decide use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family about non-professional topics (you can keep your personal profile and posts set to a different privacy level).
I’m sure someone here would be willing to help you get things set up to the point where you just have to post. (I’d be willing, if you give me a couple of weeks to get through my all-consuming work project.)