Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of writing a profile about Neal Schaffer, who writes the fantastic social media blog Maximize Social Business. Since I know that I have struggled with social media and often get questions about social media from writers, I asked him at the end of the interview if he would answer a few common social media questions I hear from freelance writers.

Here are the highlights from our conversation:

Jennifer: Why should freelance writers be active and engaged on social media?

Neal: They need to be considered influential in whatever they write about, and I think the more social proof and credibility they have before they reach out to customers, the more successful they’ll be. The majority of the freelance writers who contact me to contribute to “Maximize Social Business” don’t have a track record in social media. One of the best ways to differentiate yourself from other writers is through better content. The need for former journalists and excellent freelancers is only going to rise, and therefore that missing piece, in addition to having a track record, is that social proof and credibility in your industry.

Jennifer: Is there a specific social media platform writers should focus on?

Neal: Twitter, absolutely. If you want to be kind of influential in freelance writing, Twitter is where you want to be. It’s the most public, it’s where people build Klout scores and it’s searchable by the world. For a freelance writer, Twitter is definitely the place to be.

Jennifer: If a freelance content marketing writer has a poor or no social media presence on Twitter, where should they start?

Neal: Here is a step-by-step process:

1. Pick an industry.
2. Figure out who your target customer in that industry is. Titles, locations, company names.
3. In the conversations on the industry that you have written about or feel comfortable writing about, figure out the keywords and what hashtags would be used.
4. Find those people who are part of that community that are using those hashtags who work in that company or have those things in their bio. Those are the people who you obviously want to follow. Those are the people who you want to influence.
5. When you publish your content, make sure that you utilize those hashtags so that you get recognized when other people in the search for the hashtag.
6. Curate content from others that is relevant and interesting. Start with people who are already sharing your message and make them influencers. As you get started, maybe no one is sharing your content, but you need to curate content, and if you have no place else to start, curate content from influencers. Then, over time, pare that down to curate content from people who are sharing your content from your followers using hashtags. The goal is that when people do a search on a hashtag, your face comes up more and more and more.

Jennifer: Many writers cover multiple industries. How should they handle this on social media?

Neal: If I were a freelance writer, I would pick one industry to focus on in Twitter. On your LinkedIn profile, it’s fine to mention all your niches, but on Twitter that’s really kind of sending confusing messages if you are tweeting content about a wide range of topics. One solution is to write in your Twitter profile, “I write about big data, but here I’m tweeting about my other specialty, healthcare,” or whatever it is.

Note from Jennifer to my readers: I am so sorry I have been gone the past few weeks. It’s been the perfect storm of illness, my husband traveling a lot for work and work overload. But I am back to my old self and am resuming blogging regularly this week.

How is your social media coming this year? Any questions that we can help you with?