Creating and building and audience, via social platforms

Below is the outline of a workshop developed for Pf Susan Jacobson’s Spring 2017 section of Web Design and Interactive Media. This course is designed to give students a solid foundation in Web publishing, JavaScript and responsive design, and is comprised of digital media and journalism majors primarily.

Our challenge was to collaboratively discuss how to leverage social media tools an platforms to build audiences for their classwork websites (for now), and eventually for their work moving forward.

Building an audience, work like this, right?:

1. Create content.
2. 🔊 Share content.
3. Audience 😍😍😍.
4. Place advertising on content.
5. Audience 🏃🏾‍♀️🏃🏽 daily.
6. 💸 Profit.

Here are some of the notes and sketches from the students when I asked to sketch out how they think the audience-building process works:

Unfortunately, it does not work like this.

Creating an audience, building an additional audience, growing an existing audience … these are all very separate goals. So the process actually looks a little more like this:

1. Establish your goals. Are your goal around raising awareness? Education? Interaction and convening? Profit? What kind of profit?
2. Determine and define exactly who your audience is… and, no, your audience is not “Everyone on the Internet.” The only way for your stories to resonate with an audience is through a thorough understanding of who specifically they are and why they care about your content.
3. Create content. (Website with articles, photos, videos, interactive chats, event management, sales/commerce, contact, etc.) Without content, you don’t have any place to send an audience, and you have nothing to dicuss with them.
4. Develop a strategy to align audience and community building efforts with goals. This will contain specific action-items such as social media posting and responding to followers, newsletter content, content publishing cadence, as well as assigning a person to each of these tasks.
5. Share content, encourage feedback and dialogue. Really important!!
   * Respond to comments and social shares around your topic area.
   * Ask a question? Follow-up and respond. Keep it going.
   * Propose an activity. Follow-up, encourage submissions, respond.
6. Audience 😍😍😍 and community 🏃🏾‍♀️🏃🏽 daily.
7. Goals met? 💸 Profit. Goals not met? The pivot your strategy and/or make new goals.

Following this exercise, we watched Melody Kramer’s Poynter course: Social Media and Analytics: Strategies and Metrics You’ll Actually Use. While this is from 2014, there is a lot of great tips and advice for pre-professional journalists and storytellers like the ones in this class.

Specifically, Kramer goes into quite a bit of depth around NPR’s Social Media Sandbox blog, the development of a more user-friendly analytics dashboard for the NPR journalists and editors, and just how they understand their audience. Also, she explains how they were using social platforms such as Reddit and Facebook to find and gather sources.

I encourage the students to follow up this discussion and read Kramer’s mega-post from when she was leaving NPR for another job. It contains tons of tips for getting the most of Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, as well as various other useful tools. Highly recommend.

Finally, we spent our last 20 to 20 minutes brainstorming ways that we might begin to learn more about a targeted audience, before we have content or website. We thought about our own media consumption habits and took the time to align them with time of day and we documented the various ways that we come across something new, or discover new content.

Alas we ran out of class time to go too much further, though I would have like to spend quite a bit more time covering techniques for user-research and content strategy.

Following this workshop, and a bit of reflection, I made the following recommendation

I think this went OK but really worked best as a part 1 of what should probably be a three part series. I felt uncomfortable throwing so much information at them without allowing time for the new information and discussion points to synthesize in their brains between what I think needs to be at least three major topic areas. We did Part 1 today.

Here is how I recommend breaking down your challenge: “How might we use social media to build audience for our work?”

Part 1: Defining audience, community and empathy. Some social media strategies and an introduction to analytics.

Part 2: Deep dive into metrics, metrics that matter, and more on analytics.

Part 3: How to write a social strategy and some case studies.