Hope is not a strategy

Social media requires a roadmap, without it you are living on hope

When you want the public to trust you, engage with your messages and respond to your calls to action, hope won’t cut it. But a considered plan will.

When we're looking at social media, we want to think about social media management. That is the process whereby you are overseeing and providing governance and oversight into the management of your various social networks.

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Don't broadcast, engage

It's really important that you think about social media, not just in terms of broadcasting, because I used to be a broadcaster, right? So I used to read the news, report the news, attend live news events, but I was a broadcaster.

My job was to tell people what was happening. Social media is not about broadcasting. And if you're only broadcasting on social, then you're failing. What we really want to achieve is pure engagement, so that two way conversation where the lines of communication are open and you're actually listening and actively speaking back and engaging in conversation with citizens.

Having a strategy and having a process for social media management is really, really important.

Public interest messaging is your core reason for engaging on social media.

If I was presenting this course to the corporate world and to businesses, their core in for using social media would be probably sales and marketing and raising awareness off their products, but we are coming out social media from a completely different angle.

There are very many reasons as to why government and public sector should embrace social media. And it's important that we progress and we elevate the standard of social media activity.

Because I would say that government and public sector are behind the private sector, are behind the sophistication of social media use by businesses, so it's really important that you play catch up. And by virtue of you being here, this is your commitment to achieve that.

Social media delivers results

Obviously social media really helps with increasing brand awareness of your work and your various campaigns. You will be familiar with traditional campaigns, for example, on radio, where we describe them as always on campaigns, because you're always there in the ear of the citizen with a particular message.

Social media gives you this also, but of course it gives you a far better return on your investment because it is low cost and high impact. It's really important at the S3 (search, social and smartphone) AGE that we raise the profile of our senior leaders.

It's not good enough anymore to hide behind a corporate logo. People want to hear from other people, trusted voices, subject matter experts, so social media helps establish a high profile for those senior leaders. And when we think about traditional media, and I still engage in some digital and traditional PR for some of my clients, we have spokespersons that would normally go out and be the face and the voice of the organisation.

When we transition to the world of social media, it's really important that we have a variety and a broad range of voices that we can put in. And so it helps us establish profile, and higher profile, for a range of people within our organisation. It's very important to stay top of mind as a trusted source.

We know that the infodemic is now a crisis in the world that we live in, the spread of fake news and misinformation. Social media has a direct impact on bringing us valuable website traffic. It also allows us to generate citizen engagement and conversions.

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