What I Learned About Social Media in Real-Time

As a millennial and a marketing communication specialist, I consider myself pretty good at managing social media. I studied it in school. I gained real-world experience in internships. I manage my own personal pages. But this past week, I learned that there's a whole other aspect of social media management that my training could not have prepared me for.

Currently, as one of my jobs, I'm on the iHeartMedia, Inc. Street Team. The stations I work for teamed up with Shriners Hospitals for Children for the 8th Annual Love to the Rescue Radiothon last week. My job for those two days was to help cover our social media accounts (Twitter, Instagram stories, and Facebook stories) throughout the event. I would take pictures of what was happening and post about our patients and sponsors. It helped that my Digital Content Director had set up a Trello board with most of the information I needed to post.

But the hard part was covering the event in real-time. We were broadcasting on-location, and a lot of things were happening really fast. When a patient would come up to be interviewed on-air, I'd have to take good pictures, pick out good quotations, and post them immediately. For the first day, I would take pictures before the interview would start and then record the interview so I could sit down and play it back, write down a good quotation, and then tweet it.

On the second day, I was told that was inefficient. "Covering events in real-time is a lot different than sitting in an office planning out social media posts," was what I was told, and I really appreciated the feedback and the fact that this challenge was acknowledged. I quickly learned that the best way to do this was to get a good picture, have Twitter open, and quickly type out a good quotation as soon as I heard it. If I forgot the exact quote, I could embellish it a little (which is, luckily, something I'd learned to do from working in public relations). Doing this also gave me more time to keep up with other types of posts on different accounts.

Covering events on social media in real-time is difficult because so much is going on around you all at once, and it's easy to miss things. You need to know what to pay attention to and decide what's important on the spot, and then make it look and sound pretty on social media. As a natural planner, this was hard for me, but with a little practice, it's doable. I ended up doing a great job. It was stressful but also fun!