Organizational Uses for Social Media

When I think about social media, I think that I first think about how I use social media, then I think about how organizations use it. Social media can potentially benefit every organization, but I think that it also comes with potential harms as well. The interaction between customers and whatever organization is involved, is key to maintaining public relations, reputation, and business. Organizations can also use social media to better communicate within the company as well as communicate outside of the company. In this blog I am mainly going to focus on the experiences that I have had or noticed that organizations have used. The summer after my freshman year of college I had an internship with a non-profit where I helped with social media, specifically with topics that we were working on as an organization. One tool that I found to be very helpful was Hootsuite. This tool made it possible to schedule tweets in advance so I didn't have to constantly tweet throughout the day. This was especially helpful when we would release a new poll, or we would have a constant feed with quotes from people signing our petition. I would get a build-up of quotes, then in one afternoon schedule tweets for the rest of the week or month. It was really easy to change the time or day of the tweets, so if something did come up and we wanted to wait to tweet something until a better time, we could easily go in and change it in Hootsuite. This helped me manage my time better and that way I could maximize the amount of work that I got done. This was also nice because we could prepare graphs, statistics, and much more, and instead of having to save it then pull it back up to tweet it once the study was released to the public, we could create the posts at the same time we made the visuals. It may seem like a little thing, but it saved a lot of time and made things much more efficient. Along the same lines learning how to hashtag hunt was a very helpful skill. This internship made me more comfortable using a hashtag in the middle of sentence instead of waiting until the end to list all of the hashtags. As talked about in class we often used #utleg #utpol because the issues that we were working on directly involved decisions that were affected by Utah legislators votes. This was important for people in the Utah legislator to see and people outside of it to know who to talk to about the issue.
On another note besides this I have noticed, and we have talked about it in class, that the public sphere of social media is important to organizations, This is a place where dialogue is fairly open to everyone and there for everyone to see. It is important that organizations use this to promote their brand and initiatives as a company in how they interact online. This can be through sharing news coverage of the organization, offering promos, showing success stories, and many more ways. When I think about organizations that I follow on my social media all of them have a strong sense of getting clear, simple, efficient information out and responding in the same way.
Organizations who use social media get many benefits from doing so, but we have also seen how in the process of trying to use social media for that benefits other organizations have ruined customer relations and it has actually done more harm than good.