Considering the modernisations in marketing and communications today, particularly in content creation, the audience size that one can reach seems so limitless.
With these advancements, having the ability to connect to the widest demographic that we can has become a key to standing out in the digital world.
Mariah Fox, Social Media Manager – Assistant Director at the National Disability Insurance Agency, provides us a better idea of how this can be achieved below.
Because as much as we want to tailor-fit our content to our target audience, we never know the scale of people out there who might benefit from the content that we produce.
Mariah also shares a social media feature that she thinks would greatly benefit social media professionals of today, based on her more than eight years of professional experience in social media.
Read on and learn from Mariah’s insightful ideas.
How do you determine content opportunities in local attitudes and comments, policy modifications and initiatives, and high-performing content?
In local attitudes and comments we look for re-occurring themes. We are lucky that our audience is very collaborative and they problem solve with one another, but when they aren’t able to answer each other’s questions, and there is a theme developing we use as the basis to create content to answer those questions. To promote policies or initiatives, we look at the key messaging, so that if you saw our post you could have a generalist POV, but also a way to find further information. With high performing content, that is your best marker for future high-performing behaviour. So what was it about that piece of content that made it successful? And then breaking down into content type, subject, CTA…breaking down all those elements to recreate future success.
Read also: Almora Boucher of DFES on dealing with today’s crisis communications (commsroom.co)
What have been the most challenging situations you faced in managing the social media channels for NDIA? How did you address such situations?
I think the most challenging part of the job is that each member of our audience is a unique person, with a unique life, but we only have limited capacity to communicate with them. Our job is then to try and provide generalist information, that speaks to a wide audience, but in a specific way. The outcome of this is to allow people to tailor information to the way they live their own lives, and where necessary then provide them the tools to find out more information. It’s not always easy, and we haven’t always gotten it right, but we strive for it every day.
Can you think of any social media feature that must be developed to help organisations better establish trust among their communities?
That’s a good question. Maybe a better, more reliable (and cheap) way to measure sentiment. I think if there were more reliable and cost-effective reporting tools that accurately measured sentiment (although a part of me shudders to think how advanced that AI would be!), then everyone would have an accurate way to internally story tell to be able to advocate for change. Lots of sentiment tools are cost prohibitive to SME’s too, so there isn’t equity in reporting and understanding either.
Mariah’s comments are her own views, not that of the NDIA.
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.