Social Media

sm tree pixabay

I personally came early to social media, creating accounts on all the early networks as they appeared. For example, I entered Facebook in 2005 when it required an .edu email to register, and I had used Friendster and MySpace before that. I viewed social media as something I needed to know about for my teaching and consulting work.

My own graduate work in media focused on video and that was an entry point into much of my tech life. Teaching in the graduate program in Professional Technical Communication at NJIT, I introduced social media to the program in 2010 when it was clear that corporations, government, and big and small businesses all needed the expertise of specialists in social media.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter get most of the attention, but there are also other social networks that have a more focused audience, either geographically or by other demographics.

Social media management services can include profile creation, strategy calendars and planning, engagement, campaigns, use of video and imagery, management and maintenance, social listening and social advertising.

Concurrently, I started working with a few clients to create strategies for their organizations,

For three years I worked with the non-profit National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as the social media coordinator for their higher education affiliate groups. This included creating an overall social media strategy, formulating policies for employees and scheduling daily content to networks with a focus on higher education communities. The three groups – the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Two Year College English Association (TYCA), Conference on English Education (CEE) – were brought into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram. I provided content for humanities teachers and scholars on issues, initiatives, and programs related to professional practices.

I also worked to create a social media strategy for NCTE use of video. In recording, editing, and posting videos to NCTE’s YouTube channel, we started to move the organization, as other organizations had already done, into the use of video as social media.

Currently, I create and manage social media for several small businesses and individuals. This involves everything from maintaining a Facebook page so that it has regular content, to updating a multi-network (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) strategy of scheduled posts.

As I tell my students, the strategy for using social media is very similar whether you work with a small business or large organization. Yes, the neighborhood restaurant and a national restaurant chain have differences in scale, but concerns about the ethical and legal use of networks and messages, and building community and engagement exists in organizations of all sizes.