Thanks to everyone—L.A. area members working in education, book production, developmental editing, translation, and more—who came out during the heatwave for our second meeting in the Glendale area.

Member Linda Ruggeri provided us with best practices for using social media for our businesses. She offered reasons to use different platforms (Twitter or LinkedIn?) and complemented her talk with a handout on 20 tips to gain organic followers. Some takeaways: Post consistently, engage meaningfully (instead of only “liking”), and create a social media editorial calendar to plan your posts.

Andrea Gutierrez, Linda Hatton, and Helga Schier were gracious enough to be our guinea pigs as we viewed their websites to start our discussion on optimizing business websites. Co-chair Janet Long gave us handy tips on search engine optimization (use headings, shorten those sentences and paragraphs, lose the jargon!). We’ll be using those to get ourselves to the top of client Google searches! The discussion revealed some issues to keep in mind for the web guru we’ll bring in at a future meeting.

Breaking bread with scones, we exchanged business cards, picked each other’s brains—How do we find where our clients hang out? How do we manage the potential clients’ expectations about what editors do?—and shared tips.

We hope to see you at our next meeting in October (Hollywood-Wilshire area).

Here’s to building community in sunny L.A.!