Advocacy is an act of soliciting for a cause, idea, policy or support with the desire to provide help and support to encourage individuals in the state of need (Almog-Bar & Schmid, 2014). Social media have been identified by many researchers has a strong medium for advocacy, it has expanded advocacy efforts by connecting new networks of community actors to take necessary actions (Guo & Saxton, 2014). Social media advocacy is a form of media advocacy, it is defined as a process of influencing decision-makers through the media channels that are of importance to them such as newspapers, radio, television, newsletters, journals, magazines, and social media (Fresina & Pickles, 2013). Social media serves as an innovative tool for enlightening and mobilizing the community by aligning with the community psychology principles to enable individuals contribute to social issues and change efforts (Scott & Maryman, 2016).
The use of media advocacy is strategic, it requires the fundamental principle of knowing the goals to be achieved, the individuals to be targeted, framing issues and message construction, construct media advocacy plan to deliver messages, create pressure for change and evaluate these are five strategies for considering media advocacy by (Wallack, 1994). (Bowen, Gordon, & Chojnacki, 2017), organized a group of student to conduct a social media research to test the engagement rate of social media usage for advocacy, in the research there was a fixed goal to create awareness on different personal issues like domestic violence, the given target individuals were youths and their messages were constructed to promote change. The evaluation of the research lead to the conclusion that social media could be used for advocacy because it facilitates engagement through different platforms for different individuals.
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Social media has a wide range of platform such Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and Instagram, twitter for instance have been used to generate hashtags to lay emphasis on different issues, it helps spread advocacy for different cause to like-minded individuals and other social media platform users. Also, these hashtags are to be engaging, educative, communicate effectively and create dialogue between individuals (Saxton, Niyirora, Guo, & Waters, 2015). The use of hashtags effectively can increase interactions on different social media platforms since these platforms are interconnected.
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