Notes from CASE Social Media Wednesday | June 12, 2012
Participating Orgs/Schools mStoner-communications strategy for higher ed University of Texas at Austin Cornell University Loyola University Chicago Northwestern University Webster University
Good Ideas Facebook – Setting goals around engagement, not fundraising (Success stories limited mostly disaster relief and Obama 08) – Getting graduating seniors to join your Facebook page – Live streaming big campus events – Latch on to specific stories over a period of time – Young alumni tend to latch on to specific emotional connections rather than institutional news; Use nostalgia
Good Ideas Twitter – Tweeter feeds from the university president or a beloved professor work really well – #RightNow hashtags, where users tweet what they are doing right now, have worked really well – Syracuse tweets from a person rather than the institution LinkedIn – Career services office have seen a lot of success on LinkedIn – Check to see that every group members is an alumni
Good Ideas LiveStream.com – Popular platform for streaming live events Instragram – Instagram photo contests are very popular YouTube – Consistently monitor videos that students have posted, and reuse this content
Bad Practices Stop adopting new technology for the sake of it Stop starting new accounts Stop inappropriately using third party posting tools Outsourcing social media to outside agencies Blogs - Ban 'X ways to do this' or Questions that have obvious answers 'Should you be on Facebook'? Posts for the sake of posts, without content
Analytics Goal Setting Increase engagement by _% Drive x number of people to website Drive x number to gifts Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Feedback, likes, follows, pageviews, conversions
Analytic Tools Google Analytics Social Interaction Tracking - tracks what content is shared on your website Google URL builder - sets up specific campaigns - content+source of traffic+ specific links Facebook Insights People talking about this - someone has shared a piece of content from your site Engaged users - number of people who clicked or view a post Real value is in exported data Klout and Kred measure Twitter engagement and reach