I remember it well—the day my writing mentor said I had to be on Twitter. First came the panic.

‘No’, I said. ‘No way. E-mail eats enough time as it is.”

Another kindly pair of friends took me aside and explained that really, Twitter wasn’t so bad, and you needed it to market you books (no mention of how). So they helped me get an account and TweetDeck, and set me loose in the Twitter world.

And I never used it.

The few times I logged on, it was like going to the dentist and I HATED the fact that my darn computer dinged and disturbed my train of thought every time a new tweet came through. Now I know I could turn my speakers down, but I needed the volume to tell me when business e-mails came through. The trouble was twitter kept dinging and dinging. So this post is about Twitter and Facebook and social media in general and how to make it manageable for you. Next post will be on how to make it WORK for you.

The thing with Twitter and Facebook is that you have to understand that they have tremendous potential, but you also have to understand that there are downsides:

• Social media can be frustrating as heck until you understand them and how they work.
• Social media can feel like floundering in deep water until you decide the parameters of how you are going to participate.
• Twitter and Facebook can become veritable time sinks.
• Social media can begin to take over your social life.

Like anything new, understanding Twitter and Facebook requires purposeful learning. Yes, it is possible to simply open an account and begin tweeting or sending messages, but why, and what do you send messages about? One reason may be to simply keep in touch with existing friends. Once you’ve connected with your friends, it’s easy to fulfill this purpose. You can use Facebook and Twitter to send out urls for blogs, which is also useful, and if that is all you want, then the social media is working for you.

So to make social media work for you, this is a first decision point: what do you want from Twitter or Facebook?

If you want to leverage social media to help with marketing your books, this requires you to become more involved in the social media family. It requires you to become more comfortable with working with social media. A good place to pick up pointers is through Lynda.com, which contains video tutorials on the basics, but also sessions on marketing.

Marketing your book requires building your connections to others in the Twitterverse, or Facebook Universe. This involves building connections to friends, which means that you need to do more than marketing. You need to give people something of yourself and your interests, something that both you and other people find of value. This involves reaching out to others to become their friends, either by identifying common interests, or through their connections to people you friend or follow. This is easy enough to do, by simply clicking on a person’s profile and friending or following them. Hopefully they will reciprocate and follow you, too. But the trouble is this can become an obsession. You can spend hours identifying friends and follows, and you have to ask yourself what is most important—this social media work, or time spent writing (and time having a life).

This is a second decision point: Are you a writer first and a social media savant second, or is it the other way around? If you are a writer, then you may need to set parameters around your time spent on social media. For an example, I try to put in thirty minutes to an hour in the morning and the same in the evening.

But at the same time you need to understand that social media is social. This means that even if your original intention in joining the Twitterverse and Facebook was to market your book, you need to do more than that. You need to have something to add to the Twitterverse. This was initially where I stalled. I didn’t know what I could add to all the comments out there. Well we all have things to add, whether it be book recommendations, reporting on your latest accomplishments, or links to blogs that you found important, these are the things that will build your followers and your social connections, and when you get your first message from a follower it starts to feel fun that you are building connections to people—people who might eventually become your friends.

And not your dentist.