How Social Platforms Affect an Author's Career (Blog Post)
Please Note: This is an excerpt from a blog post that I wrote for my Self-Publishing class. It was originally formatted in MLA. Formatting has been changed slightly to match the website’s style.
In “Entity influence and interactive relationship: the use of social media by publishing-related entities”, by Yanni Yang, Yue Zhang, and An-Ling Xiang, the influence of social media on individuals and corporations in the publishing industry are examined. They reference the idea that social media platforms such as Wattpad, give authors the ability to gain feedback in real time.
In the case of this article, however, they pull data from the leading Chinese social media site called “Weibo”. Much like Melanie Bold’s analysis of Wattpad in the article, "The return of the social author: Negotiating authority and influence on Wattpad", she references that 57% of the website’s popular users don’t write in english. This article examines how social media is used in another part of the world (in this case China). Which of course to us, in the west, is a foreign market.
It was first hypothesized that the influence an account had reflected positively on its effectiveness with social media ie., what the account’s goals were in terms of sales, growth and more. The idea is, if the relationship between the account holder and their audience members (both potential and existing) is nurtured, the higher likelihood the account holder has in gaining more sales.
Secondly, they theorized how an account holder’s ability to communicate with potentially new customers and existing ones, and how they disclose information about their products to their audience, reflects well on the account holder’s reputation.
Lastly, they examined how interacting with followers gained these accounts social capital. Moreover, how that social capital is influenced by an account holder’s interaction with their audience.
For individuals and corporations (commercial organizations in the article) alike, an account holder’s ability to build a para-social relationship boded well when it came to advertising and gaining monetary value for their work. The same can be said for the second hypothesis which is that an account holder being able to meaningfully connect with their audience also worked in their favour. This includes receiving feedback and being proactive in solving problems customers are faced with.
However, interacting with one’s audience (having an interactive relationship), and having it influence their social capital only pertained to corporations and commercial organizations. The results showed that corporations more than likely had the social standing needed to gain success on social media.
The article concludes that interacting with one’s audience does not guarantee success for individuals operating on social media. The presumption is that smaller creators have audiences made up of people close to them rather than people who could be potential readers and customers. Therefore, it is advised that they focus on expanding their audience through other means.
But once an individual account has influence it will have the positive impact they seek and interacting with an audience that is not just made up friends will also be effective by this point.
Works Cited
Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. "The return of the social author: Negotiating authority and influence on Wattpad." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2018, pp. 117-136. Sage Journals, https://doi-org.library.sheridanc.on.ca/10.1177/1354856516654459.
Xiang, An-Ling, et al. “Entity in uence and interactive relationship: the use of social media by publishing-related entities.” The Electronc Library, vol. 39, no. 1, 2021, pp. 152-168. Emerald Inisight, https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-08-2020-0228.
