@Karen Very happy to see that you encourage students to partake in social media. When I was in undergrad, social media was not as prevalent as it is now (ex. CNN regularly promoting their anchors’ twitter feeds), but it was still out there and growing. Sadly only a few of my professors saw the value in encouraging us to learn about it and included it in their teachings. Great to hear more stories about it being in the classroom

@Ryan I’ve spoken about this with people before and tend to get the response of “scratch the campaign idea; social media is long term.” The illustration and explanation of layers was another attempt at showing what I meant. It’s good to know that I succeeded in making the distinction (at least how I see it) between campaigns and long term strategies.

And sharing the approach, that could probably be another post in and of itself. Even those these “new fangled social media tools” are changing the way we interact, some things remain the same in terms of how we can engage people. Your point on the Masters (golf) twitter feed brings me right back to my freshman year in high school. The History teaching wanted to give us pointers on how to deliver a presentation: Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, Tell ‘em and tell ‘em what you told ‘em.

We do some of this already. With our first post or podcast episode, we tell people why we’re here. Then we execute the plan, give recaps at milestones and summaries at the end.

I’m two sentences away from starting a whole new post right here, so I’ll stop. Thanks for your comment Ryan!

I think you bring up some very salient points. First, I’m glad you made the distinction between a campaign and a long-term strategy, and I think you’ve broke the campaign aspect down very eloquently.

It’s something a lot of people don’t think about.

One client I’ve worked with created a Twitter account centered around one event, and it worked great and did it’s job, but there were 1,000+ followers wondering why it wasn’t tweeting after that.

The Masters (golf) did a great job in their Twitter bio explaining that account would be active from, and specified the dates. Simple thing to do, but communicates to your fans the approach.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts here with all of us!

@Josh As they say, there is a time and place for everything under the sun. This includes social media, but it can and will take over if you let it. Make a somewhat flexible schedule and jump right in.

Your process seems to work, except for when you announce posting once or twice a week. I’m not sure that it’s the best strategy to build the following based on frequent updates and then scale them back. If you feel comfortable with posts once or twice a week, then that is where I would start. The people you are connecting with will know what to expect from the beginning, avoiding any potential disappoint that could result from a frequent start followed by scaling back.