Social networking pains

[Jaxilon]

I have mainly resisted the whole social networking thing such as facebook because I viewed it as a colossal time sink. And although I am a gamer myself I could give a rat's pa toot about Farmville or any of those games (no offense to those who love them).

I have noticed that more and more businesses seem to be using these networks to get exposure and let their audiences know what they are up to. Now that I am working on turning my hobby into a little more than a hobby I can see using such networks to let more people know about my work.

My question: Is there a way to synchronize these things? For instance, I have my website http://www.rivengard.com and I have my dA account http://jaxilon.deviantart.com/. Whenever I want to update one of these I also have to upload the images to the other. Now if I add Facebook and/or G+ I foresee more time spent uploading the same images just to keep everything in sync. This seems ridiculous. Updating social networks is not what I want to spend my time on quite honestly, I would rather produce more art.

It would be nice if there was a hub where you could create your body of work and it would automatically propagate out to your social networks and if this doesn't exist already I imagine someone is already working on it. There has to be a better way?

[Gamerprinter]

For my Facebook page, I only have one local friend, 3 relatives - and everyone else are RPG industry people only: from those I do freelance work with, to all the staffers at Rite Publishing, a couple authors I like, then industry people who I want to know like Ed Greenwood, etc. I only post things like when I release a new product, when a product review is posted somewhere, or things like my entry to this month's mapping challenge. Beyond that, I don't any other social networking, and I certainly don't waste my time on all the stupid - Farmville, etc. games - I hate that stuff.

Except for a look see, twice a day, Facebook has not proven to be any kind of time sink for me...

[tilt]

there are programs and systems you can use to synchronize between the different social networking sites - you can also pull in your twitter and facebook feeds in Google+ ... personally I use my blog to show what I do and then just post a link to facebook and g+ when something new happens.
And as a sidenote I did spend a huge amount of time playing FrontierVille half a year ago, very addicting game - but the company kept wanting you to get more friends to play or pay so I dropped the game again. There is always the option of blocking those games from showing up in your news feed - all it takes is a click
You can easily make a couple of list of people, so you can keep your professional friends (or subscribers) from getting the family/personal updates - if you need help - add me: https://www.facebook.com/jfledeliusgehrke

[Midgardsormr]

There's a browser extension for Chrome called Publish Sync that is supposed to allow you to simultaneously publish status updates to multiple social networks simultaneously. I'm sure there are other such tools, and I am fairly sure I have some friends using tools that repost their Twitter updates to Facebook. I've blocked most of them, though, because they tweet relentlessly.

It's very easy for Facebook to devour your time, but if you use it carefully it's a powerful tool.

[anstett]

Jax, starting with your own site is the first step.

Then creating a feed off of that, not sure if DA takes a feed or has a API plug in. But like you could add a Publish to FB button on your site (similar to what is here on the Guild) I don't see why you can't just auto publish any post to your site out to FB, Twitter, G+ etc. Not sure if WordPress is up to auto publishing but if you can add the buttons then you could get in the habit of clicking on them your self after each post.

That is the publishing portion which should be the easiest to accomplish. The harder part is how to gain a mind share of the people who want (actually need) your work. That is the real time sink. Posting something to get noticed, recursive links back to your work/site. It will reward you with work and commissions as more people find you.

I have purchased several products over on RPGNow, etc. because of the work I have seen here on the Guild as well as hiring excellent artists such as your self for work I need. I do think that there can be a wider audience out there for some of the styles of work here on the Guild. A few years ago it took me a long time to find an old map of Puerto Rico to give to my wife for her birthday. I wanted that old atlas feel to it. Now I know better and rather than combing eBay for pages cut out of an atlas I would just hire a competent artist to create the map from scratch.

Side note for a project: Create maps of various resolutions to sell as wallpaper packages. Along the lines of http://www.digitalblasphemy.com/dbhome.shtml - a collection of maps to change on my screen.

I do not think that Social Networking is the answer to finding wealth and fame for mappers, but at least you can make your self a bit more famous.

BOB