How to use social media
It's becoming increasingly important to augment a traditional communications strategy - press releases, events, email blasts, etc. - with a social media strategy. Effective use of social media will not only increase the reach and impact of your project, it will improve your project itself, giving you access to a community of interested advisors who can help make your ideas better.
As a component of your grant, we'd you to incorporate at least two social media aspects into your project - a blog and a Twitter feed. At the end of this tutorial, we'll ask you to supply the URLs where we can access them both.
Blogging
The goals of your blog should include:
- Tapping into a community of fellow practitioners with projects relating to yours
- Giving a transparent view of your progress and what you're learning from your project
- Keeping those of us who want to know about your project up-to-date
If your project is already built around a blog, make sure you include a category or separate feed that includes only news and items about your project itself.
For example, the blog for Knight News Challenge project Spot.us features a "Spot.us News" category that allows users to find posts about the site. Or if you use blogging software such as Wordpress that allows you organize your posts with tags, mark the entries that you want to bring to our attention with the tag "knightfdn."
Wondering what a "tag" is, or what software to use? Here's a collection of resources to get you started on creating a successful blog.
Twitter can be an incredibly effective tool to promote your work, solicit instant feedback, and generally extend your community. Participating on Twitter also allows you to get a sense of how others are talking about your organization.
For Knight, a well-kept Twitter feed gives us a day-to-day sense of what grantees are doing and learning. We find Twitter invaluable as a source of ideas and links to interesting and useful material.
To alert us to tweets about your project's progress, please include the text "@knightfdn" in tweets that you want to bring to our attention.
Wondering how to get started on Twitter? Here are resources to get you started on using the service.
Other social media
Of course, there's a lot to social media beyond blogging and tweeting. Knight Foundation maintains a presence on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo, as well as other sites. The key to our usage of social media is that we use Web services that deliver value to us as an organization and as individuals.
How can you tell whether a Web service will be valuable for you? See how others are using it. Observe or ask what value they seem to get out of it. Might it solve a problem or satisfy a need you have?
For more tips on getting the most out of social media, here's a collection of resources for you.