Looking back on my first social media plan

I am currently a student at The Maxwell School at Syracuse University working towards my Masters in Public Administration. I use this blog to write about my experiences at Maxwell, especially related to social media use in the public sector. You can follow me on Twitter: @pjfiorenza and please feel free to leave some comments!

It has been too long since my last post, I have been swamped with finals and wrapping up the semester. Next semester I will be assisting Prof Mergel in a few different research projects. One involves looking at social media policies, so I thought it would be a good exercise to share my experience and look back at my plan. I am going to make this a series of blog posts reviewing the program I developed.

Here is a little background on my social media plan and experience. At the time, I was serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA at Syracuse Habitat for Humanity. My position was a Marketing Liaison for the ReStore. The ReStore accepts new and used building supplies and resells the products to the public at a discounted value.

We were really lucky at Habitat with social media. We had success immediately with the program. I always attributed the success to our mission and the enormous strength of our brand. In the first month of using social media, our web traffic increased by over 30%, a blog post I had written was picked up by Habitat for Humanity International and published to their monthly newsletter, and the ReStore won the Green of the Crop Award. The Green of the Crop Award is sponsored by New York’s Creative Core, the award is given to the “greenest” company in CNY. I applied for the award through Twitter and asked our followers to nominate us as well. In the next month I was asked to speak at the Syracuse BizBuzz Conference and share Habitat’s social media experience. It was a great experience, and I was thrilled to share Syracuse Habitat’s story.

For now, I am going to post my table of contents for the plan, and throughout the next few weeks I will talk about certain elements of the plan. The social media plan was ultimately part of a six part series of manuals that I wrote related to marketing at Habitat. The plan highlighted below is the social media component. Other components were Working with the Media, Marketing Volunteer Manual, Social Media Informational Packet, ReStore Website Information, Syracuse Habitat for Humanity Marketing Plan.

Please feel free to leave me a comment or shoot me an email with any questions. I was able to write my plan and have success because of reading blogs and learning from others experiences. I’d love to talk with anyone about their plan and any strategies they found useful. If you are writing a plan that is not for a non-profit, I hope you still find this information beneficial. There are certainly themes and components of a social media program that cross all sectors – I’ll touch on this throughout the posts.

Table of Contents

• Using Social Media
• Purpose
• Using Analytics
• Delivering Content
• Looking Forward with Social Media
• Social Media Best Practices
• Social Media Worst Practices
• How to Use Different Web Applications
• Updating across multiple platforms
• What happens if I “tweet”? What is updated?
• What happens if I updated just Facebook?
• What if I add a Blog post?
• What if I upload new photos to Picassa?
• What if I upload a video to YouTube?
• This sounds daunting!
• Syracuse Habitat for Humanity Social Media
• Twitter (What is it and how does SHFH use Twitter)
• Facebook (What is it and how does SHFH use Facebook)
• WordPress (What is it and how does SHFH use WordPress)
• Picassa (What is it and how does SHFH use Picassa)
• YouTube (What is it and how does SHFH use YouTube)
• EmailNow (What is it and how does SHFH use EmailNow)
• User Generated Content Ideas for Blog
• User Generated Content Ideas for YouTube
• Potential Tweets and Facebook Status Updates