What’s the use of a blog if no one knows it exists? All those incredibly useful, too recycled articles about how to be a successful blogger claim that you’re supposed to spend half as much time promoting your blog as you are writing it. Although I can recognise the logic behind that, I’m not going to spend even a fifth as much time on promotion, but I did decide to expand my social media presence to drive a bit of extra traffic towards my little corner of the web.
As of now, January 2020, you can find me on:
Considering I have a like-hate relationship with social media as there’s no love lost there, I’m pretty surprised at myself for taking the plunge on quite so many levels. I only had Facebook and Instagram before, as well as a YouTube account that I only used to upload videos for this blog before I updated my WordPress service package. But, when in Rome… and now that I am in Rome, I get to rant about it, so beware, incoming snark alert!
I don’t exactly feel the need to share my breakfast with the world, but at the same time I like sharing my travels with my friends and family, which is kind of how this blog came to be, and I like seeing what people I care about are up to. I’d mostly been using my personal Facebook profile for that before and for keeping in touch with my friends from foreign places, but then some people asked me if they could share some of my photos and here we are. And since I love to cook, I’ve also started sharing the meals I’ve put a bit more effort in on Instagram stories since I’ve made the account, which puts me right into the stereotypical Gram user category, so here we are, again. As I said, it’s a like-hate relationship.
Facebook feels old and familiar, in a sense that it has witnessed all my teenage derps and burps so it must surely be used to everything, while using Instagram feels like you’re magically compelled to put your best foot forward, grow luscious locks and go a bit boho. I’m proud to say I’ve never had a personal Instagram account and that adding #hashtags to my posts still induces a non-neglectable amount of internal angst, so I guess I’m not fully gone to the dark side yet.
YouTube is the least challenging by far, as I fully recognise and acknowledge that I am not a video person and never will be, so I have no expectations for it. I grew up without proper Internet connection and watching a video online required an ungodly amount of preparation and patience, so I never got into watching music videos. Even today I don’t watch any vlogs or follow any channels and all my videos are under 30 s long. Why do I bother then, you may ask? Well, to me taking videos is more of a “look at that, it’s moving” kind of thing, where I’m trying to capture an impression of something I’ve come across and not trying to communicate anything by it, let alone express myself through this type of medium. So, my videos usually end up being rather short, because standing still for more than a few seconds at a time seems like a waste of my life when I’m travelling. Until recently, my YouTube channel served only as video storage so I could share those impressions here on my blog, but I’ve since discovered the timelapse function on my phone, which kind of exceeds expectations. So, stay tuned, maybe my YouTube channel will end up with more than 1 quality video at some point.
As for the other 3, well they were a completely new experience. Mix.com is the ex Stumble Upon, which was recommended as the blog promoting site all over the web, so I figured I’d give it a go, but I haven’t really noticed the difference between it and Pinterest yet. Speaking of which, for me Pinterest just might be the dumbest social media of all. I understand the appeal of saving pins for inspiration and ideas, but the user interface is counterintuitive to my engineering brain and trying to find some new, non-generic content requires an insane amount of scrolling and browsing, otherwise you just end up with the same type of extra photoshopped photos with a dash of “10 most common things to do in this new hot popular destination”, particularly in the travel niche. Coming from a travel blogger that’s rather hypocritical, I know, but this is exactly why I don’t significantly edit my photos and why my destination blog posts are named simply after the place I visited, as it is up to you as the traveller to decide what are the most important sights for you.
And finally, Twitter. I never saw much point in it, but it feels like Twitter just might be THE social media for me, except unfortunately not for promoting my blog. Twitter feels like it’s just daring you to share your dumbest moments, useless spur of the moment thoughts and unfounded opinions. It feels like I should make a second account named something like the_opinionated_klutz_in_academia or the_derp_engineer and tweet about how many times I’ve fallen down the stairs this week, how I managed to accidentally hit a student with my elbow during tutorials, how my bus driver this morning had a lopsided moustache and how the amount of cheap perfume on a teenager today is proportional to the amount of skin showing around their ankles in winter. Oh and about how I think certain world leaders should do us all a favour and walk straight into the Australian bushfires, and then about how Australia has been burning since September, but the mainstream world media only deemed it important enough in January, because they run out of news about phat-ass-bling singers who’d dislocated their third eyelash while doing vegan yoga butt sunning or something. See what I mean? It just brings it out of me, which I suppose is the point?
Anyhow, the world is now at my virtual fingertips, so let’s see what I decide to share with it…
P.S.: I’m happy to connect with any other bloggers and content creators through social media, so give me a follow and I’ll return it (unless your feed is full of babies, ads and spam or naked body parts).
P.P.S: Shoutout to Manca Zupan for editing my social media cover photos and to Ana Dujmovič for designing my EE logotypes.
Update September 2020:
Mix.com turned out to be a waste of my time, so I deactivated that account. I’m also reconsidering Twitter, because it just feels like the cesspit of the Internet and I don’t have time to engage with people to see actual promotion results. We’ll see.
Share your thoughts with me