Freelance Files


Social Media for Freelancers: How I Learned To Love Twitter By EVA HOLLAND


I remember the moment I decided to


join Twitter. It was September 2008, and I’d been freelancing full time for just a few months, after a couple years of part- time effort. Back then I made my living mostly from blogging for various web- sites about travel news and trends, and from writing destination travel stories for various Canadian newspapers and magazines. Breaking out of my existing outlets and into newer, bigger ones was a challenge that, so far, I was mostly fail- ing to meet. Then a friend posted on her blog about something strange and wonderful that had happened to her. She had joined Twitter a few months earlier, had experi- mented with live-tweeting a tech confer- ence she’d attended in Seattle, and then, one day, her phone rang. Conde Nast Traveler wanted to fly her to New York, put her up in a Manhattan hotel, and have her do her Twitter thing at a travel event the magazine was hosting. Oh. I signed up for Twitter immediately after I read that blog post. Maybe, I thought, Conde Nast Traveler would call me someday soon, too! It was a shallow, spontaneous deci- sion — a naked attempt to replicate some- one else’s good fortune. But it wound up being one of the best — maybe the best — freelancing decisions I’ve ever made.


The benefits


Twitter grew on me fast. I liked the chatty, casual tone, the snarky hashtags. I liked the way it felt like a social gathering of my professional peers, where we could share our work, talk shop or just swap jokes. Freelancing can be isolating — none of my real- life friends were writers, bloggers or journalists, and I worked in a vacuum most of the time. Twitter helped fill that void. At first, the benefits I derived from Twitter were largely social, intangible. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that it became my most important tool to chase new, more rewarding and more lucra- tive assignments.


I’d been working as a full-time contract editor for a travel web- site — one of the places I’d started out as a blogger back in my ear- liest days — throughout most of 2009 and 2010. But in late 2010, our corporate parent cut our funding, and my job, like everyone else’s, disappeared.


I was a true freelancer again: not merely self-employed, as I had been throughout the contract, but once again stringing together a series of small as- signments and short-term gigs. I had also begun to get bored with travel writing: sure, it was a “dream job,” but too often I felt like it lacked substance, or real-world heft. I was tired of writing about the best beaches in Barbados, or the best hikes in Hawaii.


I spent a few weeks traveling on the cheap in the summer of 2011, camping and hiking alone in a sequence of na- tional parks, reading and thinking, trying to get some clarity on what kind of writer I wanted to be. Eventually I figured out that what I really wanted was to write re- ported magazine-style features, on a va- riety of topics: crime, mining, sports, travel and more.


Fine. It was one thing to know that, and another to actually do it. That’s where Twitter came in.


I “leveraged” (sorry) Twitter in two main ways as I attempted to “pivot” (sorry) into the world of narrative journal- ism.


First, I used it to put my work out into the world — not just in a blanket broad- cast, but in a targeted effort to get my sto- ries in front of the right eyeballs. A friend had advised me that the best way into fea-


ture writing was, well, to write features — to write the best features that I could, for any outlet that would have me, rather than aiming to write short pieces for bigger outlets and hoping to move up into feature writing from there.


So I experimented with reporting and writing my first few fea- tures for free, for a friend’s start-up, an online magazine called Vela. On Twitter, I followed and attempted to befriend the people behind journalism “curation” sites like Longreads, Longform, Byliner and The Browser, and whenever one of my stories was published on Vela, I launched a one-woman PR campaign, tweeting my story to my new contacts.


I figured that on the Internet, a story was a story, whether on


The New Yorker’s website or a homegrown blog. If my stuff was good enough, and if I could get the right people reading it, assign- ments at paying publications would follow. Meanwhile, I also used Twitter to follow and get to know the writers I admired most, and the editors I aspired to write for. I wanted to be a part of the “longform” community. I tried to strike a balance between the shamelessly self-promotional tweets about


18 SEJournal Fall 2016


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