The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 35 Facebook has also been crucial to our efforts to engage the public, specifically the high school and college student segments. We diligently post links to programs, events and information of interest to those audiences in order to encourage their interest in the Foreign Service.This includes our national high school essay contest, infor- mation on internships in foreign affairs, and often fairly general information on Foreign Service life. We plan to continue our outreach to those groups using Face- book as a primary outlet. AFSA’s Facebook pages for The Foreign Service Journal and for Foreign Service Books/ Inside a U.S. Embassy have also proven to be popular with AFSAmembers and, more significantly, with non- Foreign Service Facebook users, who include students and others interested in the Foreign Service fromaround the world. As of mid- December, the Journal Facebook page had 5,251 likes, while the Inside a U.S. Embassy book page had 4,186. Although there is some overlap between the pages—and we do share postings from time to time—the audiences for each page vary quite a bit. Following the Little Blue Bird Our next venture was to join Twitter in early 2011, just as it began taking off. It has now overtaken Facebook in popularity among teens and those under 30. According to a study Pingdom conducted in 2012, the average age of Twitter users is 37—but even as the average age of Facebook users is rising, the average age of Twitter subscribers is going in the opposite direction. In fact, teens are flocking (pun intended!) to Twitter at record rates. In addition, more women thanmen use Twitter; well over half of AFSA’s nearly 700 Twitter followers are women, and the aver- age age is just over 40. Among our followers, you’ll also find a large number of organizations, agency offices and bureaus, embassies and consulates, and foreign affairs watchers.This network of con- nections has amultiplying effect that takes our message to an even wider audience. Quite honestly, it took us a while to figure out the best way to make use of Twitter’s strictly enforced 140-character limit and immediacy.The Foreign Service tends to rely on the written word fairly heavily, so the succinctness of this particular platform took some getting used to. Over time, though, it has become an impor- tant tool in our communications kit. In addition to serving as reinforcement for messages fromour website and e-mails to themembership, we are now using Twitter quite heavily to push the excellent content from the pages of The Foreign Service Journal out to various audiences. Eachmonth, we tweet out every single feature article and column from the new issue, making use of hashtags and Twitter handles to catch the attention of those we thinkmight appreciate the content. For instance, our October issue featured an article about Togo by a retired USAID Foreign Service officer and returned Peace Corps Volunteer. Our tweet about it included the Twitter handles for USAID (@USAID) and the Peace Corps (@PeaceCorps), prompt- ing both agencies to retweet the notice to their respective followers. This ensured that more than 850,000 individuals saw a link to that article appear in their Twitter feed. This illustrates howAFSA can best use Twitter—as ameans of engaging outside audiences by pushing our content directly to them. If you are on Twitter, we hope you will follow us @afsatweets. Moving Pictures! AFSA joined YouTube in 2011. Most Internet users are familiar with this site; in fact, you’ve probably viewed a video there without realizing it. But AFSA uses YouTube in a very specific way, which was well defined from the very beginning: making all AFSA events here inWashington available for online viewing by the general pub- lic and our members outside theWashington, D.C., area. We have been very pleasedwith the results. With aminimal resource and time investment, our events have been viewed almost 10,000 times in two years.This expands the reach of our program- ming tenfold, at the very least. Our most popular YouTube video is still our April 2012 panel discussion on third-culture children in the JEFF LAU