How Can You Use Social Media to Develop Leaders?

Social Media really lends itself to developing leaders. Social Media can be used to provide new leaders with an opportunity to develop their communication skills. The instant messaging features of Facebook or the ability to hold a live chat using twitter can provide new leaders with an opportunity to use technology to gather, share experiences, ask questions and develop new skills.

Got Writer's Block?  How To Get that Blogpost Written

When working with new leaders it is often important to provide a recipe. In the Guest blogpost above the family leader was asked to share about her experience attending her first national conference.  The organizers provided her with a list of questions to get her started.  The questions included:  How were you picked to attend the conference?  Did you need to submit an application?  What did you do to get ready to attend the conference (did you meet with other members of your state team before the conference?  Did you have to make your travel arrangements?  How did you handle childcare while you were out of town?  What types of clothing did you pack for the trip).  What did you learn during the conference?  How will you bring that information back to your state?  What didn't you know before heading out town, that you wished you had known?

New Role?  Want to Share?

Another way to expand family leadership skills is to ask family leaders who may have new roles, Chair of a Committee, Chair of a Council, or staff to a committee.  To write a few blog posts about this new experience. This type of blogging can help answer questions for other family leaders.  It can provide a forum to explore changing roles, the complications that arise when a family leader moves into a role or when a family leader is also a provider or professional staff. Sharing these experiences can be helpful to other family leaders, and can create a community of practice.

Expand the Reach of Others

One of the reasons we like to Web 2.0 is how easy it is to share, repackage, and re-share content.  Sometimes the content we find is too complicated or uses legalese, sometimes it is too vague for our purposes. But thanks to the advances available to us we can rework content to suit our needs.  

Don't Forget to Hit the Share Button

We also like to hit that share button on Facebook or the retweet button on twitter. It's the 2013 version of that Breck's commercial: I told someone and she told someone, and so on! With only a few minutes, we have a quick blurb and can quickly share information with our followers that they might not have seen from the original poster.  We can even add our own spin, by writing our own blogpost that explores our thoughts on the topic, link to the original site and share the whole thing via Facebook and Twitter!

Won't Our Followers Be Overwhelmed?

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, there is so much content floating around on the web that sharing, re-packaging and re-sharing is necessary. In addition, it does take visitors time to view, absorb and act on content.  Thus re-sharing is often a necessary activity on the web.

Start With A Plan

When using social media to inform and support it is important to start with a plan of action. The first thing to do is to decide how frequently you plan on updating your contact. You can simply pull out a calendar and start scheduling your content. It is important to think about how much time it might take to develop that content. You can spend time drafting content beforehand, so that you have content ready for posting.  

Use a Calendar

One way to begin is to use a calendar and review various awareness months. April is Autism awareness, June is Aphasia awareness and October is the Campaign for Healthier Babies. Using these months can help you to plan topics. If you are trying to educate families regarding the Part C or Part B of IDEA system, then using the APR/SPP (Annual Performance Report/State Performance Plan) calendars.  For instance, a blogpost about the importance of family involvement in the development of the Annual Performance Report, would have more impact if it posted in the late Fall/early winter. 

Frequency

Decide how often you can post.  While you write a blog once a month? If you only have 12 ideas for blog posts, than once a month might be the right schedule.  It is definitely preferable to do one post per month, than to upload 12 posts in 12 days, and follow that with nothing.  You might generate some great buzz in those first 12 days, but your followers will be long gone in three months when they realize you don't have anything else to say.  You can also use other social media sites to generate buzz about your posts and to drive people to your blog or website.

What's your endgame?

Finally, it is always important to keep in mind your endgame.  Why are you writing your blog?  What do you want people to do after they've read your post?  Do you want them to contact you?  Are you hoping that they'll take some sort of action? If so, have you helped them to figure out what to do, when to do it and how to do it? If not, you'll have to go back and revise your plan to include reference to your endgame.

Why Branding is Important

Having a consistent color scheme and using consistent fonts and logo is important to your social media plan. The photo above shows a website, blog and Facebook page. Visitors can tell from the strong purple and turquoise borders and the logo that they have found the right site.  Using links that connect directly from one site to the next.

Not Ready to Jump In? 

Even if you are not sure if you want to start using Twitter or YouTube, it is probably a good idea to set up an account now using the name you wish to use, so that you can use your preferred name.  You can also take some time and check out other sites to see who others are following, what they are posting about and how many followers their posts have generated.

Visuals

It is  important to have high quality versions of your organizations logo. There's nothing worse than uploading a poor quality version of your logo.  Some sites, like Twitter and Facebook rely on square profile images, while others, like YouTube work fine with rectangular images. It is also important to know the hexidecimal codes that are used in CSS or HTML that are used to tell your browser what color to display.  Twitter and YouTube both allow users to create their own backgrounds, which can insure that you have a consistent theme across platforms.