2016 was a truly exciting year for the global IEEE Young Professional community. One of our largest focus areas was improving our communication to members and young engineers, primarily through social media.

We ran a number of different experimental social media campaigns to see how we could best reach our global audiences. We wanted to better understand:

How do we reach the right audience?
How do we reach the largest community for a particular event?
What are the best outreach strategies for our initiatives?
Our social media platforms run around the clock and the most important areas we focused on last year were:

Timing: targeting posts for early in the day
Visual Communication: ensuring all posts had visual support
Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn engagement
Collaboration: cross-sharing of other IEEE content, as well as content from external organizations
Want to know what we did? Here are some highlights from our 2016 social media campaigns on Facebook:

1. Advertise upcoming events of interest to our global community

2. Share informative IMPACT blog articles written by our team

3. Highlight upcoming webinars and online events

4. Promote achievements of our local Young Professional affinity groups, and highlight past local events

5. Interview IEEE President-elect candidates and encourage young members to vote in the annual IEEE election

6. Share information about award opportunities and interesting content from external organizations

Want to do it yourself? Check out our infographic to see some of the best practices:

Special thanks goes out to Ms. Preeti Kovvali on our global IEEE Young Professionals Marketing and Communications Team, as well as Ms. Alina Benny, an IEEE Young Professional volunteer who graciously put together the infographic.

We would also like to thank each member of the IEEE Young Professionals family for being part of our global community. We’re looking forward to another exciting year. Please feel free to reach out to us any time with questions, comments, or ideas. We would love to hear from you. Now, go apply some of these online social media practices in your own Sections and Societies to maximize member engagement!