Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/1491904
The Power of Data Building Your Social Media Toolbox By Elizabeth Barcelos W H E N E V E R I T E L L someone about my job as a social media manager, I'm often asked things like, "How do you think of what to post?" or "Where do you your ideas come from?" Over the years, I've built what I like to call my content toolbox: a collection of communications tools that work for every social media platform. They 're changing all the time, but what sticks with people and makes them pause instead of scrolling onward is consistent and translates across platforms. This issue, we'll be walking through how you can add data to your content toolbox. My English and language arts educators will know that three elements of a compelling argument are logos, pathos and ethos. For those of us whose Greek is a little rusty, that's the appeal to logic, appeal to emotion, and appeal to the writer 's credibilty. Using data is a great way to hammer home the logos part of the equation. Let's break down some examples. sac City strike: Every Student Deserves a Teacher Reports are a gold mine of data. You just have to dig up the best nuggets, present them within a compelling frame and turn them into a treasure trove of social media content. When the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) was gearing up for a strike in Spring 2022, their frame was simple and compelling: Every Student Deserves a Teacher. With that frame in mind, we had a post ready to go every day, each featuring a different statistic about the staffing shortage in the district that supported our frame. Social media thrives on quick pieces of content (think about how short a Tweet or TikTok is), so rather than posting a link to a long report that people may not even read, we were able to create a several days of compelling posts that fit our frame, all from the same document. 38 cta.org Teaching & Learning