From the day you launch the Hearken tools on your site to your 50th Hearken-powered story (and beyond!) social media is a crucial tool to teach your audience about the public-powered process, keep them engaged over time, and even to spread to new communities. When you first launch a new Hearken project or series, we recommend you develop a social media promotion plan to ensure that the launch will be smooth and that you'll get as much engagement as possible. Then, as you progress, make sure you keep promoting your Hearken project or series throughout the year.  

As with any relationship, regular communication with your audience is key! Fortunately the Hearken process provides you with many natural touch points where you can provide your audience with updates or encourage them to engage in new ways. Below we'll lay out tips and examples for each of those touch points. But first we'll share some social media best practices that apply at every step of the way: 

In the examples below, you'll notice that many Hearken partners use image tiles to spice up their posts on Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes those tiles contain the logo image for a particular series, other times they contain cartoon illustrations of the Hearken process, or sometimes they just contain a little text with a quote or a call-to-action. If you're not a graphic design wiz, you could do something as simple as taking a screenshot of a voting round or a question in the EMS. 

We also recommend a free tool called Canva, which makes it very simple to create image tiles for different social platforms.  

At every touch-point, find ways to acknowledge and celebrate your questions askers. This is a key way to you show your audience how much you value their participation.  

The great thing about the Hearken process is that it provides a behind the scenes look at your editorial process. Take this as an opportunity to share more about your process on social media. Do you write out your production schedule on a whiteboard? Share a picture! Did your story take a surprising turn based on audience input? Or did your question asker join you for an interview? Say so! 

Our goal is for audiences to become more aware of and loyal to your brand, not ours. So there's no need for you to tell your audience that you're using Hearken, or that you're launching a new Hearken series. Seriously, don't @ us! 

Let your audience know you're launching this new way for them to talk to you, and that you're eager to hear from them. Give them some context about what kinds of things you're asking for (examples of questions, etc.), and why it's worth their time to engage with you (because a reporter might go find the answer! because you might get to go with! because you'll make the paper/show/podcast more relevant to them!). Some examples: 

https://www.facebook.com/Kenosha.News/videos/10154143583128020/ 

https://www.facebook.com/texastribune/posts/10155084836975837 

https://www.facebook.com/LancasterOnline/posts/10154754860076395 

To introduce the idea of "Only in New Hampshire" to the audience and invite their questions, an NHPR digital reporter/producer researched and found community Facebook groups in the station's listening area. She said she looked for the kind of groups where residents "swap updates, ask questions, and advertise garage sales." She posted in those groups an invitation to ask questions, tailored to that community/neighborhood. Here's an example of a post she made, for inspiration:

The quest to get your audience to send you questions requires that you make repeated invitations to them to participate. You can use lots of different techniques to invite more questions after you've launched, such as highlighting common themes ("our audience is SO curious about recycling!"), sharing questions you've answered so far, or highlighting submitted questions that you're excited about but haven't answered yet.  

When you put your favorite questions into a voting round, the next step is to let people know it's time to vote! You can use a newsletter, and do a web post, highlight it on your homepage, and even promote it in real life, but you'll probably also want to do some social media posts throughout the round. It's a great idea to let people know what questions they'll be voting on (generally), and if possible, the names of the people who submitted the questions. 

This whole effort is about engaging your audience, so it's important to keep them feeling in the loop about what's going on. When you start getting good questions in, let people know. When your voting round ends and you have a winner, let people know. When your reporter is out in the field hunting down the answer, let people know. When you publish the answer, let people know! Social media can be a good space to give those smaller updates that may not warrant a full post on your website.  

Often times there's an opportunity to include more of your audience in the reporting process beyond your question asker. Depending on the story, you might be able to crowdsource photos, observations, or opinions to support your reporting. 

One of the best ways to encourage more people to ask questions is to highlight for them that the people who have had their questions answered so far are ordinary people like themselves.  

If you're lucky, your question-asker will share the story publicly in a way that you can share (retweet, etc.) from your organization's account. 

You can also use social media to expand the conversation around your stories. For example, you could have Facebook Live conversations about the stories you're working on or recently published. 

Community Engagement Producer Lindsey Foat of KCPT shared these tips on conducting Facebook Lives: