There’s nothing quite like social media when it comes to marketing: It changes daily, responds instantly to audience behavior, and rewards brands that listen as much as they speak.
As social platforms continue to evolve, marketers are being pushed to rethink how they show up and engage. As a social media specialist myself, I’m constantly approaching these digital environments from new angles — What is our audience really interested in? How can I turn a single moment into a long-lasting conversation? Does anybody truly care?
In an effort to answer these questions, and see how I could refocus my thinking with new inquiries, I picked up Jenny Li Fowler’s Organic Social Media: How to Build Flourishing Online Communities. Within these pages were insights, frameworks, and guidelines that anyone within the social media community can learn from.
The 6 Ms of Social Media
Organic Social Media wasn’t my first interaction with Fowler — at the 2025 EduWeb conference I had the opportunity to sit in on her Elevate Your Social Media Strategy and Gain Leadership Buy-In session, which soon after had me interested in more of her thought leadership.
The session, and the introductory chapter of her book, focused on the 6 Ms of social media, a framework developed by Fowler to assist with the strategy-creating process.
1. Mission: What are the Goals?
Unlike an institution’s overarching mission that defines general purpose, this social media strategy mission acts more like a specific quest — defining this mission means understanding the end goal and the steps necessary to achieve it.
By clearly defining your mission, your content gains a specific focus. Why do you want your brand to enter this specific social media platform? What do you want to accomplish by running a themed campaign? How are you going to build out this content? Answering questions like this will shape your next step.
2. Message: What are the Stories You Want to Tell?
People don’t always care about the point itself — but they do care about how the point is told to them. And anyone will listen to a good story. A good message must be consistent and laser-focused, so much so that you as the social media specialist might be sick of hearing it over and over.
The marketing rule of seven lets us know that audiences need to be exposed to your brand at least seven times before they take action. When the message is constant and clear, they’ll know what they’re in for.
3. Management: What are your Processes and Procedures?
Social media is often spontaneous, by-the-minute, and ever-changing. That doesn’t mean your process should be. With proper management of your social media strategy, you gain the trust of leadership and stakeholders, are able to quantify your methods, and have documentation to look back on.
Record your process, from idea conception through after-posting interactions. Report on your findings, and learn from what you discover.
4. Medium: What are your Primary Platforms?
When it comes to new platforms being announced, many are quick to hop on without a defined purpose – as long as we’re getting our name out there in as many spaces as possible, right? Wrong. Be intentional with the platforms you put your brand on based on what post types will work best for your storytelling needs.
“Virality doesn’t have anything to do with what platform it’s on and everything to do with the content itself,” Fowler says. An example from our work with the Lindsey Vonn Foundation comes to mind here: currently, the brand is only active on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
While TikTok is today’s short form video content king, LVF isn’t active there yet, and for intentional reasons. Despite this, short form video content is still made for the brand — it’s just posted in different avenues (and does extremely well). On Facebook, a platform constantly heralded as “becoming obsolete”, a recent reel garnered nearly 500,000 views purely organically. As mentioned by Fowler, “social media isn’t dead, It’s difficult.”
It’s all about experimentation, A/B testing, and, in many instances, pure luck. Be intentional with your accounts. Platform without purpose yields no gains.
5. Metrics: What are you Tracking?
Data is the clearest way to see if what you’re doing is working. Numerical data (think follower counts, engagement, likes, shares, etc.) are all championed metrics that measure growth and reach, but less quantitative data like comments and community sentiments are just as important.
Take screenshots, track numbers, and gather data from the start — this way you’ll be ready to report at any given moment.
6. Monitoring: Are you Listening to Your Audience?
Unlike other avenues of marketing, social media provides a unique opportunity to be in the same space as your audience and have them interact in real time. Social media users aren’t afraid to give feedback — they’ll let you know what they like, what they don’t like, how they feel, and what they need.
Comments and direct messages are often the most direct way to listen, but a wealth of information can be found indirectly through brand hashtags and within online forums. The way Fowler puts it is key: “The process doesn’t end when you hit ‘Post’. That’s when the community building part happens.”
Understanding the Algorithmic Man Behind the Curtain – Or Letting it Understand You
Almost everyone in social media has had to deal with, explain, or appeal to the algorithm in their work as if it were a digital deity. But what is the algorithm, and how do we get it to work in our favor?
According to Fowler, here’s what we know:
“They are mathematical sets of rules written to sort and rank massive amounts of content posted every day. Some are written to prioritize advertisements and to choose which content is displayed first in search results. Others are written to show each user the content the algorithm thinks they like and will engage with… every algorithm is written to get to know a user’s behavior.”
With that in mind, how do we appeal to the algorithm gods? Fowler says rather than getting to know and adapting to the algorithm, we should let it get to know and adapt to us. By remaining consistent in content that your audience already knows and engages with, the algorithm will take note.
When news of algorithm switch-ups hits, don’t overreact. Refer to your strategy, or rethink your tactics if you notice continuous downward change. Spend time in the apps themselves and become familiar with day-to-day adjustments. Temporary fluctuations are inevitable — growth isn’t perfectly linear.
Intentionality & Authenticity: Fostering a Sense of “They Get Me”
Approximately 6,000 tweets are sent every second. At least 95 million photos and videos are posted on Instagram each day. In chapter 5, Fowler asks an essential question that should be at the top of every social media specialist’s mind: “what’s going to make your content stand out from the rest?”
The answer lies in intentionality & authenticity.
On Intentionality
Fowler’s chapter 2 analogy perfectly encapsulates the concept of intentionality:
“You wouldn’t buy a hammer just for the sake of buying a hammer and then decide to build the bookshelf. The need for the bookshelf comes first and when you decide you would like to build one, you would assess if you currently have the right tools for the task.”
For organic social media to be a success, we must be driven by purpose, not by reaction or what we think we’re supposed to do. Additionally, this purpose must be clear and specific — a vague direction of “creating buzz” won’t get you far. To define your direction, talk to your teams. What goals are you aiming to achieve? What does your brand stand for? Stick to these values and make sure that your content emulates them.
Quality over quantity is key here. Don’t throw unintentional posts at your accounts in the name of consistent daily posting and hope they’ll stick. Spoiler: they won’t.
On Authenticity
When we work on higher education storytelling, we like to say that students have the fine-tuned skill of detecting anything that feels fake. The same goes for social media users, and they won’t be afraid to call it out right in your own comment sections.
This is why authenticity is so vital in social media content. The true essence of your brand is something you should be proud of, and it should naturally bleed into the content you create.
An authentic image can be built in a variety of ways, one of which being user-generated content (UGC). This content comes directly from your audience, individuals who have no stake in your brand and will speak honestly about their experiences. With this raw authentic perspective in mind, many audience members are more likely to take their word for truth, and may find themselves more invested in your brand.
UGC partners with brand-created content in the form of ambassador programs, another way to ensure authenticity. While UGC is directly from the audience, ambassador programs shorten the bridge from audience to brand by empowering trusted community members to speak on the brand’s behalf in a more structured, long-term way.
The Lindsey Vonn Foundation’s Youth Ambassador program is a great example of brand-led content from real voices impacted by its mission. Working with these young women in content creation allows us to develop stories with deeper emotion and meaning behind them.
Organization Matters: Making Sure Your Workflow Makes Sense
The third social media M, management, can all too easily get lost in the chaos of staying on trend and in the know. That’s why it’s so important to create an organized workflow from the start and stick to it.
Amongst different organization formats, content calendars are key for social media work. Simply put, content calendars are an editorial schedule that teams use to plan and schedule their content, connect their goals to action, and provide a visualisation of their social strategy. When done well and organized logically, they’re also a log of historic social media initiatives that can act as a reflective tool.
As Fowler delves into in chapter 7, no two content calendars are the same. Some are simple and to the point, and others appear more like a secret language between itself and the social media team behind it. As long as you understand and can work efficiently with your content calendar, that’s all that matters.
A content calendar can be a literal calendar, a spreadsheet, a platform, or an internal tool… there are no limits to how this can look. Personally, I’ve taken the same route as Krista Boniface, the Senior Social Media Strategist at the University of Toronto, who uses Asana. This platform’s interface allows me to look at my content calendar from a variety of angles: I use the calendar view for week-by-week planning to take dates into account, and I use the kanban board view to organize my content into different strategic categories.
The content calendar doesn’t just make itself — there are other techniques needed for optimal workflow efficiency. Fowler provides the following checklist as a starting point for what to document in your content creation entries:
- The date assigned
- The person working on it (if there are multiple people on the social team)
- A brief description of the content and what it’s for
- An attachment or link to where the assets are stored
- The title
- Copy for each individual platform it will be posted in
- Alternative text
- The name of the person receiving image/video credit if needed
By making note of these informative bits, you’re creating a clear archive that anyone can follow and learn from, including your future self.
Social Media is Serious. So Are the Individuals Behind it!
While reading Organic Social Media, I not only found insights that will shape my social media strategies, but I also found a sense of feeling understood. As Fowler puts it herself, “feeling like you’re understood is a powerful emotion,” — a sentiment that can resonate in the world of social media and in the overarching professional realm.
As a social media director my job involves creativity, strategy, staying on top of an ever-changing medium, brand management, communication, marketing, storytelling, educating …
— Jenny Li Fowler (@TheJennyLi) April 18, 2020
But some days I just feel like my job is to feed the beast. pic.twitter.com/dc7ngQe8Xr
I’m sure at least a few social media specialists reading this have fallen prey to the “give this intern a raise!” compliment-turned insult before. I’m sure others have been asked nonsensical questions like “can we make this go viral?” (we’re always trying).
Given how social media is still so relatively new, Fowler notes that social media specialists are constantly having to prove their expertise. This, combined with the intense (and addicting) nature of social media, can create the perfect environment for burnout if we’re not careful.
Remind yourself that the internet runs 24/7, but people cannot. Take time to unplug. Stay experimental and playful. Strive for completion, then perfection. Use your support systems. You’ve got this.
Take this note from Fowler as a mantra:
“Remember, no one knows the channels like you do. No one listens to and understands your social audiences like you do. You’re the one who comprehends the current social climate… We’re all rooting for each other. I’m rooting for you.”
