Using Social Media To Explore New Writing Markets

Are you a writer? You wouldn’t mind joining some online groups and writing communities to share your ideas with others and sell your books, would you? Building social networks with your fellows could give you some benefits, including exposure, new opportunities for publishing your works, inspiration and motivation to write.

Are you a content marketer? You wouldn’t mind exploring new writing markets to outsource content creation and distribution, would you? Social media could help you find professional writers for your business, writers you could trust and rely on, writers who could help you deal with your content marketing plan.

Are you a blogger? You would look to get great content for your blog to rock, wouldn’t you? If you are limited in time, ideas or resources, social media can help you find good writers with a strong audience; they could become your guest contributors and generate good content for your blog.

No matter what you need a writer for, you want to know how to use social media to find them. So, read and learn.

Online Communities

Writers are active users of social networks: they use online communities to gain exposure, brainstorm ideas, sell their writing services, publish their works, receive feedback from peers, etc. The following networks and services can help you find fellow writers, join a team of professional writers and earn money, hire an author to generate content for you, and much more.

• Gather – a community where you can share your views and join their team of freelance writers. Perfect for journalists, looking for current events, and people, looking for a freelance writer or willing to become one of them.
• Writers Cafe – a perfect place for writers, publishers and marketers. If you are a freelance expert on various topics you can post your content there and get some exposure. If you are a person who needs an outsourced writer you can use this community to find and contact him.
• Bid4Papers – a big community of professional academic writers who gathered to share their writing experience and help others deal with their academic writing. You can join them as a freelance writer or hire them to do some writing or editing work for you.
• Writertopia – a place where you can expose yourself as a writer, manage your portfolio and use different graphic tools for progress. If you are not a writer but one who looks for them, this is your good chance to find a professional.
• Writers-Network – a large online community where writers of different genres meet. You can take part in writing contests here, review and comment others’ works, share your works with fellow writers or choose a writer to contact and ask for his writing help.

Google+

Google+ can help you a lot with exploring new writing markets. Use Google+ search to find freelance writers’ profiles and some writing samples to check if they meet your expectations. Do not forget to check their bios and “Contributor to” or “Publications” section to see what they wrote and whom they wrote for.

Here is an example.

LinkedIn

Check if you have freelance writers in your LinkedIn network: try an advanced search, type “freelance writer” in the title:

If you can access their full profiles you will be able to check their skills and career experience to decide whether they meet your expectations. As for keywords, they will depend on a type of content you need from authors to write. We used “social media” as an example.

Twitter

Do not ignore such social network as Twitter when you look for freelance writers! Followerwonk service will help you a lot here: just type “freelance writer” in Search to get the list of Twitter bios and see all general information about your potential writing candidates (their influence, activity, followers, etc.).

To improve your search results, try different terms to search for. For example:

• [your topic] writer
• [your topic] speaker
• [your topic] author
• [your topic] blogger
• freelance writer
• freelance blogger
• guest blogger
• guest contributor

There are so many freelance writers on the Web today, and all of them try to “sell” themselves, using different online services and social media. Certainly, you can’t contact all of them; so, try to choose the writers who create really outstanding content: the success of your website, blog or business in general may depend on finding and hiring the most influential writers in your industry.

They know how to introduce and advertise themselves online, they know they are good; so, if you put them work for you – you’ll never have any problems with generating and distributing good content of high quality.

____

 By Lesley Vos, a blogger and a freelance writer. She is a contributor to many websites, including Convince and Convert, Simply Hired and Killer Startups, and she is always ready to share her writing experience with everyone who needs it.