There’s no escaping the fact that we live in a social media
universe. The granddaddy of social media networks, Facebook, had 1.32 billion monthly active users
as of June 30, 2014. Meanwhile, video network YouTube racks up more than 1 billion
unique visitors each month, and micro-blogging site Twitter boasts 271 million active users each
month. These numbers demonstrate that any modern-day communicator who avoids
social media is missing out on a gigantic venue for reaching out to his or her
target audience; far too many people pick up information through social media
for communicators to give short shrift to platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
But
as blogger
Brian Reid points out, it’s not enough to merely have a Twitter account (or
a Facebook or YouTube account, for that matter). “It’s
not even enough to post things every once in a while or click the tweet button
on your favorite webpage,” Reid writes. “The modern communicator needs to know
how to engage. How to have conversations. How to share and curate and credit.
It used to be enough to know, in theory, how these tools worked. No longer.”
Yes, the basic mechanics of posting on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are vital
for a communicator, but it’s even more critical for a communicator to
understand how to interact with other users on these networks; how to artfully
create Facebook posts, YouTube
videos and tweets; and how to play around with what works well and to
abandon what does not work well. Without those skills, what’s the point of a
modern communicator being on these platforms?
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