Applying my social media skills | by Allie Acridge

I thought I knew about social media, but I knew it from a personal view, not a business or company view. I started my internship at the Center for Community Support and Research (CCSR) during my last semester at Wichita State. I didn’t know anything about CCSR, but I was interested in applying my knowledge of social media to an organization before I graduated.

I quickly discovered that CCSR had a number of different projects happening at the same time. It wasn’t long before I would get something put in front of me to post; it would be too long or uninteresting. It was a challenge to take certain things and make them “social media usable”. Especially since CCSR has a specific audience; it wasn’t students, or the general public, but the nonprofits and community coalition members they work with the most.

Part of the plan was to get employees who used social media to interact, i.e. liking, commenting, sharing and retweeting. Some were on Facebook and others on Twitter. It was interesting to see how people use different social media platforms for different things. I found it common for people to keep Facebook for their personal communications and use Twitter for business and networking communications.

Blogging was not new to me. I’ve done it for a class and I’ve seen plenty. I had the chance to create blogs, edit blogs, and post them on Twitter and Facebook. I think the more I did it, the easier it was. I expected some in-depth, very detailed information for blogs. Some blogs were deeper than others. I found it challenging was posting them on Twitter and Facebook. It was hard to get people to click on the link to go to the blog and read it.

To learn more about what CCSR does I went through every pamphlet and the website and took bits of information and put them on Twitter. I posted one a day for a little over a month. The posts had good feedback. I saved them to be used again because they provide a good, well-rounded look at the organization.

I hope my time at the Center for Community Support and Research helped them. It was fun learning more and also applying what I knew to an organization.