In this series of interviews of Association Social Media Managers, you’ll be able to compare notes on what all of these fab organizations are doing with their social media management – from how they organize the roles and responsibilities, to how they manage content flow through the organization and out to social, to what campaigns they tried, to how they see the future of association social media. Read lots more of them here.
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1) Who do you report to? What department are you in?
I report to the Director of Marketing Development. I am in the marketing and membership department as a membership and digital marketing specialist.
2) Describe your social/digital “ecosystem” – what social media sites do you (or the org as a whole) manage? Are they interlinked in specific ways? How do you decide what content to post where? Do they have different audiences?
Currently, we use Facebook, LinkedIn (both a group and company page), Twitter and Instagram. Facebook is the only social media site that links out to Twitter and Instagram. With Facebook I try to not be as promotional, focusing more on creating content that will engage people and get them to interact with the page. Our Facebook posts focus on a lot of news articles, fun facts, exam preparation questions and job postings.
The LinkedIn Company page follows a lot of the same posts as Facebook. However, the LinkedIn company page does have more job postings, since it is a more professional network where people go to search for jobs. On Twitter I post everything that I post to both Facebook and LinkedIn to encourage more interaction. On Twitter we have more of a company following so anytime news of a company in our industry is released, I tweet about it and tag that specific company. We have the most member interaction on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages whether it’s commenting or liking a post.
3) Can you describe the internal collaboration workflow with other areas of the association (e.g. are you part of a team that meets on a regular basis)? How do you manage content flow? How do you manage monitoring and responding across the organization?
Our association is very small, so I am the only one who manages the content on social media. I work closely with my Director of Marketing Development and Director, Membership and Meetings to figure out when I should broadcast certain events on social media. I meet with my Director of Marketing Development weekly to discuss any social media questions that may arise or any new ideas that I would like to pursue. During this meeting, my manager will make sure that certain topics are being highlighted in social media. In order, for everyone to know what is going on in social media during the current month, I update a white board in my office at the beginning of each month. The board has a general outline of the topics that need to be broadcasted throughout the month and includes specific deadlines for events.
4) Describe a typical day for you – and any favorite tools you use regularly for anything related to social media.
A major component of my day is checking my Google Alerts to see if any news has come through that our followers would be interested in reading. I receive over twenty Google Alert emails a day. I also go through our online job center to see if any new jobs are posted that I send out through social media to notify our followers. Additionally, every Thursday our company releases a news digest to all our members. I then take those articles and post them to our social media sites to receive more subscribers while sharing new medical stories. In order to post on social media during the weekend and during the week I use Hootsuite. I love Hootsuite because it is free and allows for me to plan my social media posts so that I don’t have to worry about it every single day. I will always check on my social media but usually by Thursday I have the rest of my week and weekend planned out.
5) Is community management (group moderation) part of your responsibilities? Please describe those activities.
I do moderate all of our social media groups to make sure nothing inappropriate is posted. The main site to monitor is our LinkedIn group. I have set up moderations so that people with very few connections must be approved before their discussion is posted. I check the LinkedIn group every morning to make sure there is no spam being posted. I have one person who continually was posting on every single post asking how to become a Registered Vascular Technologist. After replying on the discussion, the person was still posting the same question on every post. I privately messaged this person with details and asking them to private message me with any more questions. After the private message, the person stopped posting on all of my posts and started to message the company privately instead.
6) Have you done any social media campaigns? Can you share any success stories (or lessons learned)?
A major social media campaign that I did last year was featuring a presentation of the day with a graphic to promote our 2014 Annual Conference. The graphic was very plain and simple and a presentation was shown each day to showcase the diversity of topics that we covered during the Annual Conference. A couple of the posts got some traction from presenters who were excited to see their presentation on Facebook. Overall, the presentations got traction with likes but did not have a lot of interaction with comments. I would like to have a campaign that gets the followers more involved, so I am hoping to try something new out for our 2015 Annual Conference.
7) What’s the hardest part of your job?
I think the hardest part of my job is that I wish I had more time for social media. I dedicate as much time as I can to social media but still have a lot of other tasks that sometimes take priority over social media. When I have the time I am always searching for new items to post so that our followers are engaged and not bored by the same old posts.
8) Give us a glimpse into the future. If budget and resources were no object, what would you love to see in terms of your association’s social media presence in 3 years?
I would like to promote our posts both on Facebook and LinkedIn to create awareness and increase followers and likes. I have never used the boost post function and would be very interested to see what kind of results our social media sites would see if we used that function. Additionally, I would like to have the resources and money to do a major social media campaign. I would love to have our members share photos of them from their day to day job as well as feature stories of why members chose the vascular ultrasound profession. In the first year, of taking over Facebook I have increased our followers from 717 to 1,699. I would like to see our Facebook to continually increase and reach 5,000 likes to match our membership. I would like to see our LinkedIn Company and Twitter to increase to at least 2,500 followers.
