ABSTRACT
Social media are a central component of the communication strategy of numerous organizations and content managers must both identify and deploy appropriate social media platforms in order to deliver content effectively to their target audience. This chapter seeks to accomplish two significant goals: first, we situate social media forms as part of a larger matrix of communication resources, paying particular attention to the affordances and constraints of available social media and the ways in which they are designed to be responsive to user needs and customer demands. Then, we share social media heuristics as analytic tools—specifically related to reach, presence, and privacy—that can be integrated in introductory professional and technical writing curricula in order to position social media as rhetorical and situated. By asking students to consider the ways in which social media are integrated with an organization’s communication strategy, we illustrate the ways in which critical content development and management are key to effective social media deployment. In this way, we provide a robust background for content management in social media use that also underscores social media teaching and learning as embedded practice.
