Exercise: An Offline Exercise to Improve Social Media Content

Taking your work offline is a really important thing to do when you work in digital – not just to maintain your sanity in the face of constant updates and online arguments, but also to think differently. It’s well established that moving away from computers and taking to pen and paper helps people focus, listen better, and bring fresh creativity to a project.

This simple exercise from John Kenyon on TechSoup for improving your social media content is great – try it out with your colleagues. It’s aimed at improving content creation skills, and I think it will have a secondary benefit of getting people in your organisation to understand the challenges of social media a bit better.  I’ve often found in organisations I’ve worked with, that social media strategy is often not very well understood outside the communications team, and that because of this, expectations around social media are not realistic. Unrealistic expectations, unfortunately, frequently cause disappointment, hurt feelings, and shouting.  Not to mention poor ROI on social media…

Doing this exercise at your organisation will help people to understand why some social content provokes reactions and some falls flat, and that crafting the former takes time, thought, and creativity.

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