I’ve been thinking about how to handle simultaneously publishing content on many platforms at once.
In light of Twitter’s instability and the rise of some exciting alternatives (I’ve personally enjoyed trying Bluesky and Mastodon, and will try out Substack Notes), I’ve decided to get in the habit of posting content I want to contribute to online discussions in several places. Here’s my plan:
For long-form content:
I’ll draft my content in Notion (or in a markdown file that I move over to Notion). This is convenient because I can provide a comment-link for posts, to lower the barrier to comment on.
I’ll export each Notion page back to Markdown to publish on my Mataroa blog. I personally like the Mataroa aesthetic (both for the posts and the dashboard) and I think there is some portion of potential readers that will like the minimalism. The Mataroa blog will include some posts that are still draft-y.
Finally, for my posts that I’ve sat on, received enough feedback on, or am just independently confident about their polish, I’ll publish to Substack. My guess is that while some portion of readers like Mataroa and the aesthetics/values, there’s a larger population out there that would rather read and engage with content in a less minimal setting. I’m also excited about potential integration with Substack notes.
For short-form content (micro-blogs!)
I’m going to try and standardize my Twitter, Mastodon (hci.social), Bluesky, and LinkedIn accounts.
I’ll probably have some set of microblogs that are basically advertisements for my posts and papers. These will go to Twitter and LinkedIn.
I’ll also have some microblogs that are just me sharing cool links and stray thoughts. These I’ll send to Mastodon and Bluesky.
I’ll probably use one formal profile picture and bio for LinkedIn and my personal website, and a more casual profile picture and bio elsewhere.
Some goals
- Minimize additional time spent doing “social media management labor”. For me, I feel pretty confident blogging is valid work. I’m firmly in the “writing is thinking” camp, and I think I need to spend a good amount time each day just writing in a mostly distraction-free UI. Paper writing is of course more obviously “productive” but I think a balance of writing papers and blogs can be helpful for both genres. Therefore, I want to try and spend time writing content and spend little time pasting things between dashboards etc.
- Share things in a way that elicits useful feedback. A big advantage of writing blogs is getting high frequency feedback from a wider audience than your typical work network. Thus, I want to try to maximize low barrier-to-entry avenues for feedback (replies on Twitter/Mastodon, comments in Notion, etc.)
Why I wrote this
Writing up this “social media plan” was in part just useful to clarify my own thinking on the matter. But I figured it might be of interest to other people in a similar boat, especially academics thinking about blogging about their research and trying to figure out a balance between professional and semi-professional uses.
As always, I’m also curious what you think, so this post itself will be a co-published Notion page and Mataroa blog post.
Comments?
You can comment via this Notion public link.