Sometimes you gotta break the rules

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As a serial contributor to the decline of social media — i.e., the disturbing trend of pushing RSS feeds of news releases to our university’s Twitter and Facebook sites — I was happy to read some positive reinforcement that, sometimes, it’s OK to post press releases to Facebook groups.

That’s the first of three social media “rules” addressed in this post by Bryan Howland, “Three Social Media Rules We’ve (Intentionally) Broken.” (Thanks to Malli Gero for posting the link on the PRWise LinkedIn group.)

The bottom line for a business [or university-ed.] engaging in social media is to give their audience/customers/fans, etc. what they want. It is far better to have happy customers than it is to worry about what the social media “purists” think about your efforts.

Here, here.

As for posting press releases in social media space, Howland points out that you can use press releases to create an interactive experience with Facebook fans or Twitter followers. “Sometimes,” he writes, “your fans want to read your press releases. … [D]on’t take advantage of your fans, or confuse promoting your business with engaging with them, but don’t be afraid to give ‘em what they want either.”

Our automated Twitter feed to Facebook pushes news releases and blog posts to our fan page. Sometimes, people even interact with those posts.

Then again, we try to mix things up a bit on both Twitter and Facebook. We manually post tweets and status updates from real live people typing on real keyboards, just like I’m doing right now. (Or so you assume.) As Rachel Reuben pointed out in a recent .eduguru post, “Something as simple as a [Facebook] status update that ties to an emotional time in new, current, and former students lives seems to resonate.”

So, what social media “rules” are you breaking?