Don’t let social media overwhelm you. You don’t have to be perfect, but the following information will at least help you come across to your audience as interesting and memorable!

Generating Content

You can’t spend 100% of your time generating original content. You wouldn’t have time for anything else! It’s ok to find content online to share with your social media followers as long as you do so carefully.

Create and bookmark a list of resources. Look for websites and social media accounts that share interesting and factual information. Experts in your industry might include advice columnists, bloggers, professional societies or organizations, professional news sources, and other reputable sources.

Steer clear of controversial topics or providers that your followers might find offensive. If you’re using an opinion piece from one of your sources, make that perfectly clear to your readers.

Use the share buttons to give proper credit. On an article, hit the “Share to Facebook” button or “Tweet” button. If you found a post you’d like to share, use the share button on the post. That will ensure that your followers see the source and its URL. If you can’t hit the share button, make sure you give proper credit in your post. For example, end your text with something like, “Source: The news experts, http://www.theirwebpage.com”.

What to Share

It’s perfectly ok to share your credentials, awards, short staff introductions, birthdays, community events you’re a part of, partner organization information, industry tips, regularly posted topics branded by a hashtag, and more.

Don’t forget to have fun. Show your followers your personality through photos, jokes, memes, fill-in-the-blank sentences, questions, videos, and behind-the-scenes information. The key to your posts should be variety. Don’t do the same thing day-after-day, week-after-week.

Your Posts

Write a first draft of your post and then think about how you can shorten it. If the reader has to click on “read more” to expand your post, it is too long.

Use vague teasers to drive clicks to your website. This means you need to update your website at least weekly with blogs, press releases, and other content. Drive your social media fans to good content where there is a call to action and you’ll never go wrong.

Also, if you’re looking for information on hashtags, look to our What’s a Hashtag Blog Post for that information.