Writing and rhetoric happen everywhere, especially on the web. In addition to publishing research in conventional venues like journals or magazines, many researchers use social media to help share their ideas with wider audiences. Doing so prompts them to think even more deeply about the importance of their work and how to convey it in different forms.
Thinking about the delivery of your message involves a range of decisions about genre, platform, and medium. Each type of communication comes with its own affordances and constraints. In other words, it enables some possibilities while limiting others.
Individuals and organizations almost always maintain a website today. But a functional website by itself no longer counts as sufficient. Leveraging social media has become important not only for marketers and advertisers, but also for anyone who hopes to use writing for personal, professional, or civic purposes.
Consider how various rhetors use Facebook to spread their ideas. A nonprofit organization or charity might decide to make a page to gather attention for their activities, to spread awareness about a social problem, generate interest in an event, and to collect donations. Creating a Facebook page enables them to build a network within a few weeks, and grow it for years to come. The posting and sharing features allow them to share news and track their reach.
These newer forms of media have adapted earlier genres like press releases and public service announcements. Although many of us would still need to publish articles or reports on issues we research, we can now think about ways to deliver this information through social networks. For example, we can condense articles and reports into blog posts for easier and quicker reads, and then share links to those posts through Facebook and Twitter. We can use Prezi and other software apps to create visual presentations. We can also make short videos based on our research and upload them to YouTube and Vimeo. In all these cases, we would think about phrasing and summarizing our ideas so they make sense to a wide audience.
An organization could expand their network further by creating a Twitter account. As you might already know, Facebook and Twitter have a number of features in common. However, some people may use only one platform or the other. Many have casually commented on using Facebook for more personal and social reasons, not necessarily civic and professional. Others may voice a preference for Twitter’s character limit because it keeps people concise, while others find it too confining.
Social media platforms offer the chance for messages to become viral. When that happens, users have begun sharing your content at an exponential rate.
Rhetoricians have recently started using the term velocity to describe the decisions that people make in order to maximize the chances of a message going viral. Sometimes, a tweet can go viral by chance. Usually, it takes a great deal of sustained effort and timing. Effective social media users post often, even several times a day. They use compelling, concise language. They time their tweets to peak hours. Most importantly, they develop followings by interacting with other users and making strategic decisions about who to add to their own feeds.
Sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to join some social media platforms. For example, an academic researcher would probably want to use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But they wouldn’t necessarily need to create an Instagram account. Instagram enables many possibilities for photography, cuisine, travel, and fashion. But the platform doesn’t offer much leverage for the spread of scientific research. Furthermore, not many people use Instagram for that reason.
An individual or organization might also create a YouTube Channel to share videos from their events. They might even make informal videos with their phones at fundraisers “having fun,” in order to show a more human side to their volunteers and donors. They would be using different media and platforms tied to different appeals. In this case, uploading and streaming videos might enhance their ethos and consequently encourage more donors, or recruit more volunteers.
Sometimes, clever marketers and PSA designers can deploy social media in unpredictable ways to gain attention. Rhetoricians have referred to the “hijacking” of social media and web platforms as “culture jamming,” or the use of a product or service contrary to its original intent. For example, an academic researcher might initially refrain from using Instagram. But she might later develop an idea for covert or gorilla advertising to share a message through this platform in a novel and surprising way that generates some attention.