American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

From Association Social Media Wiki

ASHA's Social Media Strategy

ASHA rolled out several social media initiatives in 2008, mostly to see how much member interest there was and to help members understand how social networking could enhance their membership value. We highlighted our social media efforts at our Annual Convention with a sign "Facebook isn't just for teenagers," which drew many members to our booth asking for demos and explanations of how exactly social networking was applicable to their ASHA membership. We also posted a page[1] featuring the same explanations and information. Our rationale was that it wouldn't be enough to just announce we were on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin--members would most likely not understand what the point was unless we explained it.

We first started with a Linkedin group. The group is limited to ASHA members, as it enables them to display the ASHA logo on their Linkedin profiles. We chose not to enable the discussion feature when it became available in Fall of '08 because we wanted to encourage members to interact on the forums on our website.

If a non-member requests to join the Linkedin group, we send them a message telling them that, unfortunately, the group is for ASHA members only, but that they may be interested in becoming a fan of ASHA on Facebook and/or following us on Twitter.

We started using Twitter in a conservative way--basically announcing new items on our website with links back to the site. Our main goal was to see how much interest there was, how many members were on Twitter, and to attract traffic to our website. We started by doing a Twitter search for terms relevant to the practices of speech pathology and audiology, as well as for health or medical reporters. Almost everyone we followed followed us back, and members re-tweeted that ASHA was on Twitter, helping spread the word and attract any members who were already using Twitter. We have about twice as many followers as the number of people we follow, and the number continues to grow. We used Twitter at convention and the few members who were on Twitter and following us were able to benefit from the one-on-one communication it provided.

Our Facebook page has been an overwhelming success as far as numbers go--in less than six months we attracted over 10,000 fans. Fans consist of members, students and individuals--often parents of kids with speech or hearing issues--interested in ASHA. We are currently developing a social media strategy that will address our planss for using Facebook in a way that engages members and helps raise awareness of the association among the general public. We also developed a social media policy for staff, which became a part of the employee handbook.