Social Marketing: AMA SF

running social media at the American Marketing Association

Campaign Details

The Good, the Bad, and the AI-Generated

The rule of thumb that I always start with when I’m taking over a campaign from someone else is to build on what works and improve on what doesn’t. There’s no point in starting from square one unless there is truly nothing going right about the campaign, which fortunately is almost never the case. Luckily, there was plenty about AMA SF’s previous social media marketing that was working well. They consistently promoted individual events (such as seminars, panel discussions, and networking events), had a good mix of infographics and photos/videos, and got good engagement on their human-centered posts. I wanted to keep all that momentum going.

But there were issues that needed my attention as well. While individual events were promoted with good consistency, there were large gaps between promotional campaigns where no content at all was posted. There was no user-generated content from event attendees, despite the events getting plenty of good buzz online. And further back, there were a lot of obviously AI-generated graphics and text that I thought eroded the organization’s credibility. For a marketing organization, simply typing prompts into an LLM and posting them without edits was not a winning strategy.

In short, my strategy had three prongs: post consistently, post a wide variety of content, and boost engagement with more human-centric stories.

Putting Everything Together

First and foremost, I wanted to get on a schedule of posting new AMA SF content almost every day. One post every day (or every few days) seemed like the sweet spot for staying top of mind without being intrusive or overwhelming.

Luckily, there was a lot of AMA SF content being produced: in addition to our regular events, there were frequent updates to the AMA SF blog and official podcast, Misadventures in Marketing. For the second prong of my approach – a wider variety of content – I came up with a list of categories that the new posts would fall into, along with the ideal types of content for each category:

While my initial social media marketing for AMA SF was dominated by the Playmakers 2026 event, I made sure to incorporate other content throughout the campaign to keep the social feeds from becoming too event-oriented, such as podcast promotion and cross-posting blogs.

By the Numbers

It’s always a bit nerve-wracking to take over an ongoing social campaign, but I’m happy to report that since taking over AMA SF’s social media in early February, LinkedIn engagement has increased in every category compared to the last three months. Here’s a selection of the most relevant analytics:

The most impressive increases in engagement were reposts, impressions, and reactions. I’m especially proud of the increase in reposts (the highest increase!), because boosting user engagement was a key facet of my social strategy. On the flip side, the lowest metric was comments (still an increase, but a modest one), which gives me a goal to reach towards.

Looking Ahead

This is a long-term, ongoing social campaign, and I’m constantly adjusting my goals and strategy to meet new challenges. As of now (May 2026), I’m most pleased with my event promotion and human-interest posts, while my biggest areas for improvement are the blog cross-posts and podcast promotion. Those posts are typically lower-performing, so I’m doing some thinking about how to boost engagement in those categories. Given that human interest and behind-the-scenes content typically perform best, I’m planning on incorporating those elements into the more “dry” content like promoting blog entries and podcast episodes.

Select Content Gallery

The following content provides a good overview of my social media marketing efforts for AMA SF since February 2026. The content generally falls into five distinct categories: blog promotion, event promotion, podcast promotion, human interest, and AMA SF membership.