Inside the toolkit: Social media
You see them near the bottom of The Weekly every week. If you haven’t tried one yet, well, you aren’t necessarily making your life harder, but you’re not making it easier. Over the next 5 weeks, we’ll be profiling a different toolkit each week. We’ll discuss how to use the toolkit, who it’s for, and what the toolkit can do for you. First up: the Social Media Toolkit.
The Social Media Toolkit
Social media is serious business. We’ve all seen a misguided post derail someone’s career and we’ve all seen it used to make real connections. You’re probably pretty careful with what you say on social media now. After all, LinkedIn debuted in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. You know what you’re doing, right?
But could you be doing it even better? Are there traps you could be avoiding?
The Social Media Toolkit is designed for elected officials, especially those of you who run your own accounts. It can help you if you’re new to social media (or being elected!) or if you’ve been posting since 2008.
The toolkit is a daunting 33 pages long, but we don’t suggest you read it start to finish. We recommend that you start at Section Two, Know Your Audience. If your instinct is that your audience is “the general public,” your instinct is right. But taking a look at your audience as a spectrum can help you decide how you approach posting and guide decisions you might make based on Section One, Social Media Platforms.
After reading Section Two and jumping back to Section One, go ahead and finish the toolkit in order. You’ll notice the document uses sample posts. Consider using some of your recent posts instead and rewriting them based on the framework suggested in Section Three.
So, what can this toolkit do for you?
It’s going to make social media easier for you to use. It will help you make sense of posts from trolls and teach you how to leverage posts from supporters. With a more streamlined and focused attitude toward social media, you’ll be spending less time and creating more meaningful and effective posts.
