Panelists will share their experiences building unique brand voices, what they’ve learned along the way, and what attending agencies should consider as they build their own brand online.

Topics include:

• How brand voice and messaging varies depending on the platform
• The right time and place to lean on playful messaging and when not to
• The role of data in understanding your audience and how that shapes your brand voice
• How your brand voice can and should evolve over time, based on changing audience needs and brand expectations
• The role of a brand in building community, relationships, and trust
• Steps to avoid tone-deaf messaging

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The common refrain of “don’t feed the trolls” among social media managers is rooted in good intentions but leads to missed opportunities and builds barriers between you and your audiences. Social media is social for a reason, and embracing the comment section – with strategy, honesty, and humor – will help you grow engagement, your audience, and most importantly, your relationship with the people you serve.

We’ll discuss:

• Discerning true trolls from concerned residents
• Creating opportunities from negativity while assessing risk
• First Amendment considerations 
• Handling vitriol and negativity with empathy and resilience
• Developing brand advocates

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This session is a walk-through of Canva's tools and features. Anndrea will incorporate a live Canva demo so participants can follow along, and she will show Canva secrets, hacks, and features that can be extremely useful for Canva designers.

Anndrea will showcase newer Canva features like document upload, creating QR codes, and workflow hacks. We encourage attendees to bring their Canva login and work through these how-tos during the session!

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Twitter is designed to serve the public conversation. Whether you're brand new to the platform or you've been tweeting for years, this session will help you make the most of your Twitter presence by focusing on people, products, and policies. You'll learn easy ways to optimize your tweets for engagement, top conversation tactics used by government accounts and politicians worldwide, and how to have healthy, safe conversations on Twitter using conversation controls. 

 Attendees will learn:

• Organic ways to optimize your tweets for engagement 
• Knowledge of Twitter products that can enhance your Tweets
• Familiarity with tools to help you have healthy conversations

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Creating engaging content is the key to success on social media platforms. It can be challenging to ensure that your information reaches your community, but with the right tools and marketing strategies, you can build an online presence that remains at the top of users’ newsfeeds. Join us to learn more about building agency awareness, growing community engagement, and exposing your content to more users. 

We’ll discuss:

• Platform trends: what they are and how to join in!
• Case studies and best practices from your peers.
• Deep dives into stories and reels.
• Building a diverse marketing strategy.  

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Public trust. It's always a hot and important topic when talking about engaging with the public online. We know it's essential, but we don't always do or approach social media in ways that build it. 

In this session, you'll learn how the BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure has created, embraced, and benefited from a customer-centric approach for over a decade. With creative content marketing and an operational digital engagement strategy, they've driven exceptional growth and trust with the public – key ingredients when establishing themselves as resources for emergencies, correct information, and issues management.

This session will highlight the agency's innovative approach to engagement, ways to think of building public trust differently, and actionable insights into how you can improve your digital connections with your audiences.  

You'll learn:

• The state of public trust and expectations for government agencies
• Best practices for establishing trust with examples
• A framework for public-first engagement

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Social media metrics provide detailed information about your target audience, their social media habits, how they engage with your content, and their overall sentiment regarding your work. Analyzing metrics and data helps identify what specific audience your content is reaching. Additionally, media analysis enables you to assess how your audience thinks, what they share, and how they respond. Leveraging metrics helps create the most appealing and relevant content for your audiences. Thorough measurement and evaluation of the social media content further allow you to leverage key insights to help increase awareness surrounding key public health topics and issues.

Brunet-GarcÍa (B|G) has extensive experience working with government social media channels, raising awareness by launching influencer campaigns that feature powerful and diverse stories. Case studies will highlight successful and practical examples, showcasing our support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Ready, Set, PrEP campaign and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Vaccine influencer campaign.

In this session, attendees will learn how to analyze social media metrics and data, gather valuable insights based on findings, and use those insights to improve social media content performance. 

Participants will:

• Understand the importance of monitoring, tracking, and utilizing social media metrics and analytics
• Be able to describe strategies and tactics to best leverage insights based on metrics and data
• Demonstrate effective ways to improve social media success using insight reports

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The USFWS team will share their strategies for creating social media content in this session.

Takeaways include:

• The importance of evergreen web content and  using social to inform web strategy
• Leveraging various platform features, knowing when to use each for different announcements, and customizing for different audiences
• Creating "news" specific channels/audiences (for example, the USFWS News Twitter)
• The importance of compelling visuals for the public and reporters to use in communicating about a topic
• Accessibility best practices like captions, tagging locations, and audio descriptions
• Using humor when appropriate
• Maintaining accuracy and credibility above all - especially as a science agency
• Customer service, customer care, and the importance of two-way dialogue
• Leveraging trends and pop-culture references as appropriate

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Time is a precious resource for social media managers, and many are working as the only employee at their agency dedicated to social media. This panel will discuss tips to help you optimize your time, ways to prioritize projects, leverage co-workers' help, and some of the best tools to get the job done. 

Topics include how to:

• Prioritize with limited resources and set expectations for your leaders
• Grow your social media presence when you can’t add capacity to your team
• Take advantage of shortcuts, tips, and best practices that can help you save time
• Leverage support and content ideas from other departments
• Balance social media responsibilities when it’s not your full-time job

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