Your Vocal Subscriptions and Stories You Liked

Introduction

Vocal has two really useful facilities available to all users, well I find them very useful in my interactions with Vocal friends on Facebook.

Your Vocal Subscriptions

I have nearly three hundred subscribers and I get the impression that often people subscribe and that’s it, almost the same as giving someone’s story a heart and I suppose I am like that as well to some extent. If ten per cent of my subscribers read my latest post I would have thirty reads on each post on the day of posting. The reality is these days I get one or two reads and maybe five or six hearts, although there is an ongoing issue with Vocal Stats.

I drop into My Subscriptions every few days to see if I have missed anything that has not been shared on the Facebook Vocal Groups. This was very useful when Facebook crashed and now with comments, it means we can let people know that we have read and liked (or not liked) their story.

Vocal Stories You Liked

This is a great reference tool, although it would be really good if we could apply filters to this and Subscriptions (and definitely Stats but that is outside of this piece).

In the Vocal Facebook Groups, we often do read sharing in various ways. Lena Bean came up with “Who’s Link Is It Anyway?” (now administered by Bill O’ Neil) in which someone shares a story, and then the person who is the creator of the shared story does the same for two more creators. A pay it forward ideology that gets people’s work noticed and read by their writing peers.

There are similar “games” such as Babs Iverson’s Letters & Guess and these require me to choose a story by someone else. Vocal Social Society’s “Something Borrowed” is similar but that is for work by other creators that has impressed you. In the games arena, you do have to come up with something quickly.

I have liked over five thousand Vocal stories so generally I go in and drop into a random page (you can specify the page number in your browser URL) then choose some stories I have previously liked especially if I recognise the creator. If I don’t recognise the creator I try and find them in the particular Vocal Facebook Group of further afield on Facebook if I can’t find them.

I sometimes use my Subscriptions in the same way because that guarantees the latest story from the creator.

Sometimes I want to go back to a story and I realise I have forgotten the title or the author and usually by browsing The Stories I Liked I do find what I am looking for.

Concluding This Story With A Few Other Useful Vocal Features

These are just two of the Vocal additions that have made using Vocal better for creators. We always want more and that is the nature of things. The Community filter feature on your profile is useful, especially when you are looking for a particular story of yours or another creator, and you know what community it was part of. Since that came in I only update my directories sporadically as they still allow me to search my work by a single title word or phrase.

Comments are good to leave feedback on people who are not members of the Facebook Vocal Groups and even inviting them to join the Facebook Groups.

All in all the Vocal interface is improving and making our lives better.