Writing for Social Media

This course explores the use of social media campaigns for building organizational or brand identities for audiences including customers, interest groups and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look at how to use social media to create coherent messaging, build a reputation and cultivate reader loyalty. We also explore how readers and designers approach multimedia texts as complex entities that bring together language, image, sound, and gesture to produce a coherent message. With its multiple modalities—visual, aural, and somatic—social media makes different types of demands of its creators and its audiences than those imposed by conventional top-down, left-to-right texts that one encounters in books, essays or letters, requiring an expanded understanding of rhetorical strategies and contexts. By the end of the course, students will have multiplatform portfolio of social content to show employers, colleagues, or clients.