Hello. My name is Satis, and I have a problem.

It’s not a gambling problem, or a drinking problem. It’s not an addiction problem, or an incontinence problem (not yet). Nor is it particularly a personal problem.

My problem, readers, is with social media. More specifically, I don’t know how to use it.

That’s right; the blogger with nearly 3,000 readers can’t use social media. Isn’t that just a lamentable problem? It’s not that I don’t like it; I think social media is a fantastic way of disseminating information of all sorts, and it has a power to control the lives of billions of people that is, I believe, unreckoned and underestimated.

Now I’m not trying to control billions of people (mwa-ha-ha-ha), and I’m no celebrity, so I don’t expect huge things from social media. The problem I have, unfortunately, is that I just don’t know what I’m doing. Take blogging, for instance. I started this over two years ago as a forum to post snippets of my (at the time) burgeoning novel for my friends to read. I continued by writing genuinely random shit; I’ve written about everything from whales’ genitals to the color of music, and bizarrely – insanely – people actually read it! This has been a slow process indeed, but over the past two years I’ve gained a fair following, if I do say so myself. Some pieces I’ve written have been more popular than others, and two – one on depression and the other on children – were featured on WordPress’s Freshly Pressed, for which I am eternally grateful. It was something that attracted large numbers of new readers, and – I think – tipped the edge to the point where I gain new followers every day.

A similar thing has happened on my Facebook page as well; through a couple of short-lived ads, I’ve gained nearly 900 likes on Facebook, a huge portion of which are from India, which was delightfully unexpected.

However, as much as I’ve been able to gain readers and likes, I have a perpetual problem with engagement. For every post I publish here on WordPress, I might get five or six likes. I get perhaps ten visits a day. And very rarely do I get any comments (thank you, by the way, for those of you who do leave your thoughts with me – every comment is exciting for me to come across when I wake up in the morning!). The same goes for Facebook; for all the likes, I can put up a post on Facebook and not have a single person look at it (or even see it, thanks to Facebook’s weird ranking algorithms).

And as for Twitter…I have exactly five followers. Ouch.

Now while I recognize that a lot of these things take time, I’m left to wonder how much time; it’s been a good few years so far and my Twitter followers aren’t going up much. I think that part of the problem, as much as anything else, is that I’m a naturally insular person, and it’s hard for me to think of things that any of you would actually want to read! I look at an empty Twitter screen and I just. Don’t. Know. What. To. Say.

You’re probably wondering what the point of all this whining is. Well, what I really thought is that I’d love some advice, feedback, thoughts tips or tricks. What do you think? How can I make sure that what I’m saying is truly worth saying, that it’s interesting to other people?

Help!

Featured image taken from http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/10/12/third-uk-social-media-users-dont-use-facebook-twitter-youtube-flickr-pinterest.