Social Media Strategies: Lessons from Mimi Perreault.
Social Media strategies is a class designed to help students understand various social and digital media techniques as well as the public relations-based strategies behind them to help organizations engage in dialogue and build relationships effectively with different audiences and stakeholders.
"Be authentic, don't commit a C.R.I.M.E.," the first page of my notebook from my summer class explains how to be successful on social media.
Be clear and concise, the first C represents writing style. As a professional social media participant, there is a serious need to limit your word-count and to make your words count!
Have retention. In many analytic programs, such as YouTube, it is important to calculate retention over visits. This is because it is easy for someone to mistakingly click on your link, video, or post. However, if they are in the right place and loving your content, they will stay-- therefore retention is the most important metric to observe.
Image. If you are certain about your brand persona or personal image, you can brand yourself in an honest way. This will build credibility as you work on your transparency of image. It will also assist you to keep your image consistent (or honest and open about your image changes) and retain followers and fans.
4. Maintenance is a must! Not only must you maintain your clarity, retention, and image-- but you must maintain activity to be dependable and consistent. Leaving accounts unattended for days or months may allow for them to be hacked, become out of date, deleted, or mislead new followers. If your site is not maintained, your image goes down the drain.
"Let's get ethical" - David Michael Scott and Holy Flax (The Office). Ethics are moral principles that govern your thinking and decision making. Without that sense of right and wrong, it is going to be difficult to make the right decisions, keep consistency, and be honest. Ethics are what binds us together and allow us to have respect for one another.
My Social Media Strategies class has done more than teach me how to have a social media account; I have learned how to engage, brand myself, share a narrative, and how to interact online with a social community. Between creating a website, blog, twitter, and a social media campaign for a client, I have learned much more about the way people need to relate to a brand than how to have a successful social media page. I would argue that it is imperative to know your business, audience, and target audience as well as how they react to your organization (or yourself on your own website).
In today's age, an organization cannot thrive if it is disconnected to the public. Despite the type of program you are running, one social media account and a website are the way to connect and share information actively and to avoid committing a social media crime.
To be more clear, I have learned how to use:
Facebook Live / YouTube / LinkedIn / Twitter / Blog/Website / Tinder / Soundcloud / Pinterest / Reddit / Snapchat / GroupMe / Slack / WeChat / Tumblr / Spotify / YikYak / Stitcher / EpicMix / and any other relating social media platform.
I have learned how to be efficient in my personal and professional social media usage, and I have related that to a very important Nonprofit, NGO, community sustainability program. These lessons have allowed me to translate all of those theories into practice to improve the access to and transparency of my clients programs.