Social Media Strategy PURPOSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA:

Social media will account for a large part of the CASNR Ag Awareness Week Campaign. The reason for this is social media is a way to reach a large number of people with no cost. As our research has shown, 75 percent of students learn about campus events via social media. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter provide an opportunity for our event to be discussed and shared among the student body weeks beforehand. Keeping the event visible on social media sites will help us boost student attendance.

In order to reach our target audience, we must use the channels of communication they use daily. It would be highly detrimental to our campaign if social media was not used to promote Ag Awareness Week. Many students get all their news and information from social media websites. We will execute a campaign that informs students not only about Ag Awareness Week, but agriculture in general. Hopefully our target audience will get enough agricultural information through social media that they will attend Ag Awareness Week.

SOCIAL MEDIA TO BE USED:

Facebook and Twitter currently dominate the realm of social media. Incorporating the use of these social media sites will be a key factor in the promotions and attendance outcome for Ag Awareness Week. Although there are other various up-and-coming social networking sites, we feel spending most of our time on Facebook and Twitter will benefit this particular campaign the most.

Facebook:

In a strategic manner, Facebook is sure to be the most important medium for this campaign. We will regularly update our status and share other agriculture related statuses in an attempt to keep the uneducated involved. Requesting friends and making sure of a vast and loyal following will also play an important role in the use of Facebook. We will first reach out to the agriculture departments at Texas Tech and let them know it is important to educate the uneducated. In other words, we realize it will be necessary to go beyond the agriculture departments and try to promote people who are not as knowledgeable in the field of agriculture.

Twitter:

Our plan for Twitter is very similar to our plan for Facebook. We will follow as many people as possible starting with agriculture related users. We will retweet interesting facts about agriculture in an attempt to draw in unlikely followers. At the same time, we will be posting information about Ag Awareness Week and different activities that will be taking place.

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CONTENT OF PAGES:

Facebook:

While our Facebook page for Ag Awareness Week will be promoting agriculture, it will more specifically promote agricultural education and CASNR. We plan to design our Facebook page to look professional but still interesting and relevant to our target audience. Our page will be filled with an increasing amount of updates as the event moves closer as well as relevant information to inform our Facebook friends or visitors.

We intend to use our logo as our profile picture. Once Ag Awareness Week has begun, we plan to post pictures from each event and encourage any of the attendees to post their own pictures from the events they attend. There will be an album for pictures taken by Facebook users, as well as an album for pictures taken by the Facebook administrator. We will monitor those pictures to make sure they are appropriate and relevant to Ag Awareness Week.

There will also be a check-in feature available so other Facebook users can see when their friends are at one of the Ag Awareness Week events. By utilizing this specific feature, we hope to boost attendance. The page will feature a like button so that when someone likes our page, it shows up to others who may not have otherwise known about our Facebook page or more importantly our campaign. Our information on Facebook will include the times, dates, and locations of each event, as well as a link to the CASNR website and our Twitter page.

Twitter:

We aim to keep the same major themes throughout our Twitter page that we kept on our Facebook page. It needs to look professional but still eye-catching and updated. Like the Facebook page, we will use our logo as the profile picture in order for the page to be as recognizable as possible.

The focus of Twitter will be more toward updates and tags. While we will include a wide variety of pictures on our Facebook page, our Twitter page will consist mostly of pictures we, as the administrators, will post.

Users will be updated frequently about the progress of Ag Awareness Week before, during, and after the events take place. Hash tags will also be an important part of what makes our Twitter page successful. We will have a unique and recognizable hash tag that not only tags our page but also directs users to it.

KEY MESSAGES:

The key messages intended to communicate to our Facebook friends and Twitter followers are to attend Ag Awareness Week. We will talk about prizes, raffles, and events on our sites to encourage the community to attend.

On Twitter, we will communicate by tweeting often about dates, times, locations, prize winners, and raffle winners. We will use certain hash-tags for each tweet. On Facebook we will update statuses regularly and tag people involved. We will share pictures of previous years and what is going on now. We will also create a Facebook Event page.

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FREQUENCY OF POSTS:

There is a certain goal we would like to accomplish with the use of social media. That goal is to promote to as many people as possible without being annoying. We know from personal experience that we do not want to see people promoting events on our personal pages all day every day, no matter what it is. A couple of us have even found ourselves unfriending, unfollowing and blocking users who post too much. On the other hand, you want to make sure you don’t post too little. As the conference week draws near, it makes sense to post more often. The week before, we will be bordering, if not crossing the “annoying” line. We believe by this time, our friends and followers will have probably already made the decision to attend or not. By posting more often the week before, there is potential to gain more friends and followers and at the same time, it is less likely to come across as annoying given the amount of time.

PLAN TO GAIN FOLLOWERS:

Through use of flyers and advertisement, we could heavily promote our social media pages. Word of mouth is also aneffective resource when it comes to promoting our social media efforts. Spreading the word to friends both inside and outside of CASNR will help to boost awareness about Ag Awareness Week.

Another strategy we could easily utilize is our own Facebook and Twitter pages. If each member of our campaign team invited all of our friends to follow our Ag Awareness Week pages, we could get hundreds of people to add us into their social media networks. By gaining many new followers so quickly, other people will notice our event on Facebook and/or Twitter and ideally decide to follow.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS:

If Facebook friends or Twitter followers post unfavorable comments on our sites we will respond with class. If someone leaves a post with foul language, we will automatically delete the post. If someone is giving us constructive criticism in a friendly way, we will keep the posts online for others to see. If we can comment back or fix the problem, we will do what is necessary.

We will be re-posting content from other sites because it allows for more traffic on our sites. Anyone will be able to comment on these posts as long as it is in a tasteful manner. We do not want people to get in arguments or stir up trouble on our page. If needed, we will block people. A direct response will be given when it pertains to an event, event time, location, or price.

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