Social media strategy for small publications

Some of us don’t have millions of subscribers and widespread brand recognition to lean on

Over the last five weeks or so, I’ve listened to guest speaker after guest speaker talk about the wonders of the latest social media innovations to come out of Facebook, The New York Times, Mashable, the Harvard Business Review, or one of the other media giants. While I understand the benefits of learning from their examples, I can’t help but feel like there’s a huge gap in this type of thinking when it comes to implementing these ideas at the local level.

The Harvard Business Review, for example, has a staggering 2,190,473 likes on their Facebook page. Mashable has 3,412,083. The New York Times has 10,902,612, and Facebook is, well, Facebook.

Anything these social media giants do is automatically observable, and therefore testable, on a massive scale. The same cannot be said about some of the smaller pages like the one my CUNY Social Journalism group has been tasked with managing. We’ve been put in charge of managing the Facebook page for CivicStory, a small non-partisan publication based out of New Jersey that focuses on encouraging civic engagement and improving public discourse.

As of this writing, CivicStory has a grand total of 372 likes – up from 369 last week. On a good day, our posts reach somewhere around 85 people. When we’re really on top of our game, we’ve been known to rack up at least three or four likes on some of our particularly engaging Facebook posts.

Granted, we basically started from scratch. CivicStory’s presence on Facebook wasn’t exactly bustling when we took over at the beginning of this semester, but my point still stands. There are things that may work just fine for a publication like the Harvard Business Review, an institution that has been around for almost a century and has a robust and dedicated following, just don’t pan out the same way when applied to a mom-and-pop like CivicStory.

That level of institutional longevity and legitimacy fundamentally changes the way publications interact with the communities they serve. I’m certainly not the first one to bring this up. Simon Galperin is also in the CivicStory group with me, and he’s touched on this issue at somewhat greater length in one of his recent posts (he certainly used more GIFs to make his point). In particular, Simon takes issue with the idea of using content virality as a social media strategy. Larger and more ensconced brands can rely on the variety of advantages that come with having a such a huge and widespread following.

Again, I’m not saying there aren’t important and valuable lessons to be learned from these social media mega-brands, but there has to be a way to supplement those lessons with more targeted social media strategies that are geared toward small and medium sized publications.