Social Media Pitch: Strategic Planning & Content Creation
Overview & Purpose
With this assignment, we’ll explore social media + advocacy communication as a form of TPC(Technical and Professional Communication) by both analyzing and creating content for a specific advocacy/nonprofit organization. As we’ve seen, organizations regularly use social media to connect with their audiences, sometimes successfully and other times, inappropriately. You have two deliverables for this assignment:
1. You must create a pitch IN A DIGITAL MEDIUM that offers a thoughtful strategic plan for how your chosen advocacy/nonprofit organization can better communicate with their audiences on one social media account, and
2. You must create 2-3 sample pieces of content to illustrate the messages that should be part of this plan.
Objectives
This assignment has the following objectives:
• To think critically about conventions and expectations surrounding professional social media communication
• To consider how TPC + social media can support and act as advocacy
• To analyze rhetorical situations surrounding social media communication
• To practice writing and designing social media content
• To become familiar with pitches, proposals, and presentation as genres of TPC
• To translate your pitch into a digital mode of delivery
Assignment Guidelines
Choose an organization’s social media account. You are free to choose any advocacy or nonprofit organization that interests you as the focus of the assignment. However, it’s helpful if the organization you choose has a clear mission statement (or list of goals) of some kind, and is fairly active on the social media account you choose to look at. Also, please choose only one social media account to analyze—it’s too much to take on more than one account. Common platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok are all viable options. We can talk about other platforms as well.
Develop the contents of your pitch. After choosing your organization and account, start to think about the contents of your pitch. Overall, your pitch needs to argue that the organization adopt your specific plan in improving its social media communication with its audiences. You must include the following elements:
• A brief introduction that builds goodwill (connects) with your audience and explains the purpose of your pitch
• A brief review of the “current situation” in terms of the organization’s social media approach. You should briefly report on:
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The organization’s goals in using social media
The audiences that the organization is currently engaging with and the target audiences the organization should engage with
The overall strategic approach the organization has been using to connect with audiences thus far (one-way or two-way communication, or combination, etc.)
• Details for your proposed social media plan and how will improve the organization’s communication with audiences. You should explain:
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What are the main strategic goals for your social media plan? What are you hoping your changes will accomplish?
What kind of social media messages (posts) will be part of this plan? Share 2-3 sample pieces of content here, and briefly explain how they support your goals.
How often do you think the organization should be posting?
What other practices would support your strategic goals (responding to posts/private messages, social media monitoring/listening for audience or competitor information, integrating with other social media)?
Who will do this work? Do new people need to be hired? If so, what kinds of positions should be created?
Any other relevant information?
• A conclusion that reiterates your pitch and why you think it is the best option for the organization to connect with their audiences.
Digital Delivery. Instead of writing a traditional proposal, I would like your pitch to be delivered in a digital medium. This could take many forms, such as creating an infographic, a short one-sheet/white paper, etc. The choice is yours. However, there are a few stipulations here:
• Your pitch should fit with the conventions of whatever media you choose to “deliver” it in. For example, if you make an infographic, it should be one page in length and mostly visual.
• You should make use of BCRAP design principles — (balance, contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity) in creating your pitch. Check out Ch. 17 in TCT ( Technical Communication Today, 6th edition, by Richard Johnson-Sheehan).
• (Balance — between visuals and text
• Contrast — creating visual difference and hierarchy with fonts, colors, bolding, size, images, shapes
• Repetition — repeating similar design patterns consistently
• Alignment — keeping similar design elements in similar places on the page
• Proximity — keeping similar design elements close together)
• Whatever medium you choose, you must include all necessary sections and/or elements (see the “Create Your Pitch” section above).
Creating Sample Content. As part of your pitch (see above), you must create 2-3 sample pieces of content that illustrate what kind of changes the organization can make to promote engagement with audiences. By content, I’m referring to sample posts. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
• Your content should reflect the strategic goals of your proposed social media plan
• Your content should be appropriate for the social media platform you’re discussing. For example, tweets and Facebook posts are written differently.
• You can include images, videos, links, GIFS and/or emojis as part of your posts, if this is appropriate. Don’t forget that text and visuals work together!
(To clarify, the sample content you’ll create is part of your pitch. If you look at the assignment guidelines, I provide you with a loose structure for your pitch. Part of that structure includes providing details for your proposed social media plan — you can then share some of your sample content here to show your organization examples of what your plan might look like in action. So, for example, your organization might need to work on better interacting with their audiences, and so in your pitch, you can provide some sample content/a sample post that gives your organization an idea of how they can do this (maybe you create a “fake” post that asks audience members to share photos/info to increase interaction and engagement).)