Leveraging Your Media Successes On Social Media

Social media can amplify your traditional media successes. This training provides support and ideas to help you get more mileage out of your media hits by sharing them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

Social media can amplify your traditional media successes

Social media gives you an additional opportunity to leverage the success you have with traditional media. Let’s imagine that you just got a media hit: maybe you wrote a letter to the editor that was published, or maybe a reporter wrote an article about your chapter, or maybe you were interviewed on a local radio station. What can you do with that media on social platforms to get even more mileage out of it?

Post your media on Twitter

We recommend posting a link to your media hit on Twitter. In your tweet, you can tag your member of Congress to make sure they see it. This will reinforce that their constituents are talking about climate. You can also tag the media outlet in your tweet, so they see that they get a little more exposure and attention when they cover climate issues. 

So, your tweet might sound something like this: “Proud to have my letter published in @LocalNewspaper today! @RepJohnSmith, climate change is important to me, so I’m asking you and your colleagues in Congress to take action. Here’s my letter:  [insert your URL: www.link.com] #GrassrootsClimate”

You’ll see that we’re using the hashtag #GrassrootsClimate. This is the hashtag we encourage volunteers to use whenever you’re showing your grassroots climate work, which published media definitely is. This helps emphasize that you’re just a regular person in your community who cares about this issue and is working to address it.

There’s one other element you might want to include in your tweet. If the media you’re sharing happens to be an article, or a radio segment, or something with a particular reporter or journalist involved, you could tag that individual person as well. This can help solidify your relationship with that reporter and build some good will for them to cover more of your activities in the future. 

Click the “Watch” tab of this training to see examples of some CCL volunteers sharing their media success.

Note: If you need to know more about how to tag other accounts or how to use hashtags, visit our Using Twitter training page.

Post your media on Facebook

Beyond Twitter, another way to leverage your print media success is to post about it on Facebook. This shares it with your friends and family and can help you start a conversation, which could help attract more people to your chapter, or simply bring more people along in their understanding of climate change and climate solutions.

You might post something like: “My op-ed was published in [Local Newspaper] today! I wrote about carbon pricing, which is a policy that can reduce America’s emissions 40% in just 12 years. What do you think about that idea? I’d love to hear your thoughts!  [insert your URL: www.link.com] #GrassrootsClimate” 

Post your media on Instagram

The last major social platform you might want to post on is Instagram. Instagram is more image-driven and video-driven, so you might want to save Instagram for posting about your visual media successes, such as TV coverage. Or for things like LTEs and op-eds, you could take a cheerful photo of yourself with the newspaper.

On Instagram, you can follow the same suggestions we’ve outlined for the other outlets: tag your member of Congress and the media outlet if they’re on Instagram, use the hashtag #GrassrootsClimate, and start a conversation by asking your friends what they think about your work.

More support and ideas

If you have more questions about using social media to leverage your print media successes, or want to share your own ideas, you can visit the Social Media Action Team. 

Other volunteers in that group, and the staff members who run it, will be happy to answer your questions and support your work on social media.

• Steve Valk

Download Google Slides presentation.

• Social Media Forums