What happens when a small government agency, which serves a population of 200,000 people in northeast Kentucky, posts a picture of a giant rock slide covering a highway? Even when that highway's used by only a handful of residents?

It gets shared 41 times. Granted, it's nowhere near the scale of a Mars Rover tweet, but when compared to our traditional posts it's big. It's a "wow, you've got to see this" moment.

And, that's the result of strategy aimed at creating a return on conversation - that is, curating the content that helps fans and followers increase the size of the agency's social media reach and engagement.

For our audience, whether it's a giant boulder or dozens of road closures in the spring flood season, we now look for the big things - the wow factors - that get people to share content, and get us noticed.

Sounds easy enough. Especially in times of disaster, or snowstorms in our case. Our followers love it when the snow plows are out.

But what about other times? During the day-to-day work of a government agency? That's a trickier question, so we decided to ask a few more and see if we could find some answers.

First, who are we? What do we have to offer our audience?

We are, sometimes literally, on the road year-round - building and fixing hundreds of highways and spending billions of dollars.

We provide a web site, operate active Facebook and Twitter accounts, and work one-on-one with traditional media - four daily newspapers, about a dozen weekly or multi-weekly papers and half a dozen television and radio affiliates.

And, we're always working with big tools, 30-ton concrete beams and multi-lane state highways - in fact, we're responsible for maintaining more than 2,000 miles of pavement, hundreds of bridges and ensuring the continuity of travel for the foreseeable future. So, we're important.

From an audience perspective, though, we don't seem as important. We have passive followers who react very little to what we say and do online.

After all, we tax gasoline and spend the money by interrupting traffic. So we're not quite as popular as Oreo. And we can't ship our pants.

So we had to do something about it ... To take a look at our media from a qualitative standpoint - see what we could learn to turn passive followers into interactive ones - and we had to create a method to do all that without a budget.

First, we charted our social posts on current word use and interactions, focusing on shares and retweets, what people were doing with the information we handed out online.

Then, we analyzed the effectiveness of those posts - ranking them by reach and taking a subjective look at what words worked, because that's what we needed to get more people talking, to get that return on conversation.

Using that data, combined with insights from our social media platforms - and some freebies like Klout and TweetPsych - we ended up with a snapshot that would allow us to fine-tune our messaging.

It's about perspective. It didn't have to be a giant rock. Anytime we could put a follower in our shoes, give them a wow moment or something they haven't seen or would never see again ... Well, the size of it was big enough on the content scale to increase our reach.

All thanks to our sharers, our social media advocates, our brand ambassadors, who reacted to that large-scale content, who shifted from passive followers to active participants in our conversations.

They took a hot potato - a post that contained the right words, the right photos or other content - passed it on, and helped us reach our goal of increased public outreach.

We'll never win tens of thousands of new fans each year, but if we feed them well our existing sharers will take our public information messages to the masses: Our extended family of Facebook "friends of fans" (200,000 plus) and Twitter followers with a heavy fan base.

In the end, it's the content that creates the size - the size of social media reach and engagement - whether it's a big rock in the road, or a big idea, or a post with a big potential to be shared.

So what matters to your audience?