Chapter 6 Blog
In Chapter six, titled “From the Field: Social Media Engagement and Audience Analytics, the author discusses the best way to set up your social media posts for success. The technical term for this is Social Media Optimization or (SMO). Several ways that you can make your social media posts better and more effective is to add visuals. This means, graphics, photographs, Illustrations etc… in addition to using the platform's mechanism to add tags or mention specific products or accounts associated with the content. Hashtags can also prove to be a useful tool as some hashtags become trends or they become a central place on the platform to find related topics. If you want to share with your followers more information, including links is also useful. This can direct the reader to additional information you couldn't include in the original post. This chapter also points out that the most successful posts use short headlines or catchy descriptions to entice the reader. A critical information first approach followed by multiple posts is a good strategy to get the most information out quickly. Creating text that sounds more conversational will engage the audience more than third person academic text. The author asks us to consider how a social media post can continue the conversation after the story is published via callout questions or post that ask readers to share their opticians or participate in the story. Analytics themselves also may prove to be an interesting jumping off point for story ideas or it may inform what stories you should post when and where. It also may inform you of how people are engaging with your content from just like, reach, page views or new subscriptions. The book also outlines a whole section on using Twitter. However, I think in today’s state, Twitter is proving to be unhelpful in spreading content or sharing information other than hateful comments or spam/bots. However, Twitter has become and still is a useful tool in getting out information of breaking news events in real time. Ultimately, using social media can be viewed as an experiment that you may need to adjust over and over again. Use the tools at hand to inform decisions on what you post, when you post and where you post.
