For Immediate Release:

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Venturing into social media can be a daunting task since the various platforms are growing so quickly. Developing a checklist can be an easy way to get started in social media and organize your social strategy and routine.
I have outlined a few ways you can start developing your social media checklist.

 Define your audience
Identifying your target audience on social media is important. It’s easy to say that you want to target anyone or everyone who is willing to give you a like or retweet, but is this really aiding your social media goals or purpose and is your content being used effectively?
By identifying who you want to target—whether that group is students, evaluation professionals, non-profit workers, or those focused in data—you can create targeted content that will be more valuable for your followers and result in a higher return on investment for your social strategy. You can start with the basic demographics questions: age, occupation and education. Then you can identify their interests.

Develop a content strategy
It’s important to develop some sort of content strategy when venturing into social media so you can stay relevant with your audience. This helps you stay on track and keeps you from sharing anything and everything. Once you have identified what your audience is looking for, you can develop posts that match their needs.  Important questions to ask yourself when developing content are:
What is important to your audience?
What are their questions or concerns?
What do they want to learn more about?

Set up your check list for each channel
Once you are ready to start posting, you can set up your personal checklist and scheduling guide which will help you reach your activity goals. Below are a few examples:
Facebook

• Publish 1 post each day
• Dedicate two days each week to blog content from evaluation sources
• Monitor and respond to comments once a week
• Review insights at the end of every month

Twitter

• Publish twice daily
• Retweet relevant content to your followers twice a week
• Follow 15 new and relevant users or organizations each week
• Follow industry hashtags once a week

These are just a few examples. You can create a checklist that works with your schedule and social goals.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.