I’ve talked to several freelance writers recently about social media. One thing in particular stood out in my conversations with writers focused on print.

They don’t want to have anything to do with social media.

That may seem odd to those of us who spend most of our time online, but more than a few writers are still content with avoiding social media entirely. What really got me, though, is that one or two writers assumed that any social media efforts automatically equal more work for less pay.

Sure, trying to convince everyone under the sun to Digg your article is a lot of work. But I’m not suggesting that any writers do that without a good reason.

Just writing a post with social media in mind can be useful: after all, if you write an article or a blog post that gets a lot of traffic, I’m pretty sure that your editor will be handing you more work. You don’t even have to go out and chase that traffic. You just have to keep a few points in mind:

• Your article or post needs something readers can respond to — whether it’s writing up a blog post of their own or commenting, response is critical to traffic.
• Your article or post needs to have valuable information. Even if you’re just putting together old ideas in a new way, you need to make at least one point worth a reader’s time to pass it along.
• Your article or post needs to be clear and to the point. If a reader gets lost, he or she will click away — and be gone forever.

I don’t think these points should scare off print writers. But the fact remains that there will always be holdouts: I’m pretty sure that there’s a cave somewhere with a writer who still refuses to adapt his writing from scrolls to books.