Online Social Media Strategies - Generating Awareness
by Ashley High

The fourth step in your social media strategy is to spread awareness and generate social media buzz about your organization’s programs and campaigns. Ideally, as you share your message with supporters, they will pass it along to others with similar interests. However, in order for this to happen, you must build trust, credibility, and most importantly, a relationship with your readers.

General Tips:

• Promote others more than you promote your organization. Linking to others and promoting them shows you care about people.
• Your creative material should be information people want to share – recent news, controversial issues, timeliness, immediate usefulness, or humorous
• A general guideline is to write one post of your own content for every 5-10 posts that link to other websites
• Only dig/stumble/link/tweet your best posts
• Do not send too many self-promotional emails and write too many posts of your own content
• Just doing good work is a reason for others to promote you

Specific Tips:

Twitter:

• Keep your posts under 140 characters
• Remember to add the “please retweet” option to your tweet
• If you retweet, respect copyrights by citing your original source
• Respond to other tweets regularly
• Subscribe to your supporters’ blogs to discover their interests
• Direct message or email new followers and thank them for following your posts
• Use hashtags to organize event or theme specific tweets
• If your account is only for link or news sharing, note that in your bio
• Make sure your content is relevant to your account
• Do not send out tweets just because – focus on quality. In between posts, be a good listener

Digg

• Submit stories from the Internet, not just your own
• Build your reputation by digging stories and leaving intelligent comments
• Learn from people whose posts frequently are popular on the homepage
• Respond to “shouts” of stories by digging those stories
• Spent 10-15 minutes every day digging stories, making comments, and posting new content
• Remember that a post cannot be become popular after 24 hours have passed
• If you are friends with a powerful digger, let them post content occasionally on your site
• Ask your IT staff ahead of time to ensure your site can handle giant waves of people coming to your site all at one time

StumbleUpon

• Make friends; get to know other stumblers who have many friends (100+)
• Do not just use all of your own content – stumble others
• Connect with people interested in your topic
• Join niche groups related to your topic
• Stumble your friends’ content and occasionally email them to tell them you have done so
• Spend 10-15 minutes a day stumbling and reviewing content
• If you are friends with a powerful stumbler, ask them to “discover” content on your site

Friend Feed

• Do not rely solely on twitter or another blogging tool to add to your friendfeed
• Utilize ff rooms; share content directly to ff (do not dig them or share them through an RSS reader); link and comment directly on ff

Other Tools

• Guest blog on other websites
• Post videos on YouTube with URL links
• Use the LinkedIn and Facebook status section
• Use the Creative Commons licensing, or else you might accidently block another person from sharing content on their own blog

Information taken from: “Tactical Module 4: Spreading Awareness and Generating Social Media Buzz.” We Are Media Project. www.wearemedia.org.

General Tips adapted from Chris Brogan’s ebook “Personal Branding for the Professional,” and Todd Defren’s “Produce, Propagate, and Promote”

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