Aimee Roundtree

When time, money, and help are hard to come across, it’s time for organizations to incorporate strong social media strategies. Many small brands are seeing big success with social media, whether for outreach, education, PR, or promotion. South by Southwest Interactive provided tips on how to create a strong social media presence.

If you want to do big things with social media at your small organization, you have to be creative and flexible, use what works, and know thyself to create a campaign that’s effective and works for you (and most importantly, your audience), according to Aimee Kendall Roundtree, University of Houston-Downtown Associate Professor in the Professional Writing Program. Highlights from Big Social Media Results for Small Organizations:

Social media for small organizations: Best Practices

• Invite participation
• Set and know your metrics and perform sentiment analysis
• Know you purpose and set policies and training programs invite participation
• Set smaller goals and achieve them
• It’s good for small organizations to be talking about news, events, and partnerships with other organizations
• Track interactive patterns, build metrics and tools as you need them.
• Do what works for your organization, which may be unique to your audience and brand
• Being adaptive is a best practice because money and time are the biggest barriers
• Hashtags build community structure, be sure to put your mission first
• When establishing strategies, small organizations should use messages for content, not memories
• Small organizations can often do well by amplifying user-generated content

Make the voice of your organization heard through social media

• 73% of small orgs using social media. Of those not using, 81% plan to start
• For small organizations, often the best social media posts don’t support the strategic plan or goal
• Use social media to embody the organization. Share daily goings-on and be intimate in a brand-appropriate way
• Film events, share anecdotes and other clips to help feed social content. This helps a small organization to show activity
• Be aware: Despite organizations’ goals/purpose, users can change direction through contributed content

 Be brave when branding your organization through social media

• It’s OK for small organizations to wing it! Just use your intuition
• When it comes to social media, intuition can be more effective than best practices
• Don’t be afraid to say what you need to say, provide real content about what’s happening. Be concise and consistent
• Consider the ant: How is it that ants accomplish so much without someone telling them what to do?

Thanks to @akroundtree, @ACDunbeck, @inthekisser, @mirandaLwilson for your insights!