Advanced Social Media

The Advanced Social Media workshop was one of three afternoon workshops conducted as part of the 2015 NEMBC Conference. The workshop was hosted by the NEMBC’s Operations Officer, Jinghua Qian. In this day and age social media is a dominant platform to connect and engage an audience, so this session had proved to be vital for all delegates involved.

NEMBC Operations Officer and Workshop Co-ordinator, Jinghua Qian

It was a very intimate audience that was involved in the workshop, with a great mix of different broadcasters of different backgrounds and age groups. Jinghua explained what the workshop was going to be about, including using social media more effectively to reach more people, extend your program and your reach to your audience. She emphasised that this was an advanced class, so tips for things like setting up a Facebook page and social media advertising were not being covered.

She stated that the content always matters and not the medium itself in order to make social media more engaging to the target audience. In addition understanding who your audience is can make social media very effective. We went around the room to hear different stories about social media and how it has had an impact on their respective audiences. One notable example was the Filipino program in Brisbane’s 4EB where at one point they had 11,000 individual Facebook users view their page thanks to exposure during a large event. Polyfonix’s website was used as an example of a WordPress based website demonstrated to the delegates (hooray!)

Jinghua went into detail about the NEMBC’s collaboration program ‘Culture Cloud’, designed to assist radio stations with sharing resources, audio, images and links. The Cloud will provide ways to filter for certain languages or topics and amalgamate them into one search page (e.g. if ‘Spanish’ is entered, then all Spanish related shows or segments will be featured on the one page). It is certainly something to look forward to and it does have a lot of potential.

Jinghua provided some last minute advice on how to use social media effectively:

• Quality over quantity in terms of what social media platforms are being used, i.e. it is better to have a stellar Facebook and Twitter page then several ordinary Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblrs etc.
• Having a mix of different media like audio, video and blogs for variety.

Thank you Jinghua!!!

Ivan