I'm not on social media anymore. I used to be (I used to be everywhere), but after years of experimenting, it's clear to me now that social media, in most its forms, has outgrown its usefulness. When I'm busy maintaining a social media presence, I'm not focused on writing fiction. And writing fiction is one of the only things I'm kind of good at, so I'd like to spend as much time doing it as possible. 

Of course, there's always the argument that by not engaging on social media, I'm not connecting with my readers. In 2015, I had the privilege of embarking on my first book tour. Over a month and a half, I ate meals with my readers, drank beer with my readers, slept on some of their floors; some of them I still exchange texts with or speak to regularly on the phone—that is connecting with my readers. That, and writing books that, with any luck, speak to them.


Here are some writings from others that more effectively say what I'm trying to say above:

Deep Work | Cal Newport
Why I Am a Bad Correspondent | Neal Stephenson
Social Media is Making Debates Worse | Wired
How Scientific Misinformation Spreads Through Social Media | The Washington Post
One Year Without Social Media | Steve Pavlina


That said, while I don't follow anyone and rarely check messages, I do share interesting articles, as well as new updates to this site, on Twitter.
http://www.shawnmihalik.com/contact/
www.shawnmihalik.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-09
37452
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:B5QUJPPBBYQ7ZMRQ72DV5QY4EJUVEFOI
<urn:uuid:9d8b4cb9-082c-409f-897e-87944e2b4327>
2017-02-24T17:04:41Z
198.49.23.144
sha1:NTRQHZGOKXHGUBHWXF23KOXX3NT6T3Y3
<urn:uuid:3d2240b0-487e-417c-978c-44163fc5e66e>
http://www.shawnmihalik.com/contact/
length
response
<urn:uuid:0aae16a9-ed5a-402a-8ad5-17df0f5b4d50>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-09
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf