Meeting Social Media Challenges For Higher Education
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 at 4:00pm -- Kat Liendgens
As I mentioned in our road map presentation last month, it is virtually impossible to find a college or university that has not in some way engaged in social media. The reasons are obvious. Facebook has become one of the largest countries in the world, and its main demographic consists of college-age individuals. YouTube has become the second largest search engine in the world. Between January and September of this year, the number of unique monthly visitors on twitter.com increased from 250 million to 400 million. It only makes sense to incorporate social media into your communication and marketing strategy. Some of the challenges for higher education organizations are based on the sheer number of staff members engaging in social media, as well as the decentralization of social media campaigns, which can make it difficult to ensure a consistent tone and message and to measure your outcomes.
Here are some things to consider to overcome these challenges:
I’d love to hear from you. What are some of the social media challenges you’ve encountered, and how did you overcome those challenges?
Here are some things to consider to overcome these challenges:
- Define why you are engaging in social media. What do you want to accomplish by interacting on social media? Perhaps your reasons include driving traffic to your main website, providing real-time customer service, or fostering your university community. Make sure that each social media contributor is aware of the main purpose in order to be most effective in their approach.
- Set your goals and objectives. Once you’ve established your main purpose, set specific goals and objectives for your social media engagement. For instance, “Promote our new website” may not be a very measurable goal, but “Increase new visitors by 20%” is. Define objectives supporting your goals. Those objectives could be “Respond to 20 social posts per day” or “Publish 3 tweets and 2 Facebook updates per day”, to name a few. Of course, those benchmarks don’t have to be set in stone. Assess on a regular basis how obtainable those goals and objectives are and if they really support your mission. If the answer is no, redefine.
- Establish your key messages and keep them top of mind. Write down the most important messages that you want your audience to take away from your website and your social media presence. Consider creating a top 10 list in order to ensure that the key messages are always top of mind - it will affect the way you engage in social media.
- Educate your contributors on the overall tone. While it’s vital to infuse personality into your social media presence (after all, who wants to interact with a logo?), it’s also important to be consistent in your overall tone, your message, and your core values. This becomes particularly paramount when responding to negative comments. Make sure that all of your social media contributors know how to react to negativity and how to most effectively handle reputation management.
- Don’t try to do everything at once. With the plethora of social media channels and tools available, it’s easy to either get lost or go overboard and spend time on things that may not optimally support your goals. I recommend that instead of a shotgun approach, you focus on a few channels first and measure your success. What are the devices that your target audience uses the most? What are the social media outlets on which they interact most frequently? By concentrating on only three to five channels, you’ll get a much better idea of what works best before branching out.
- Don’t be afraid to try something new. Social media is a fast-moving beast. Instead of planning multi-year strategies, more and more marketers are adopting an agile approach, which means smaller campaigns, more measurement, and the willingness to try new things. Once you’ve established yourself in some of the main channels, explore other avenues.
- Track and measure as much as you can. In order to get the most out of your social media campaigns, tracking and measuring as much as you can is key. For instance, you want to know how many visitors came to your site or landing page from a link you posted on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. What type of content rendered the best results? What is the distribution of positive versus negative sentiment on Twitter? Identify key performance indicators and measure your results, so that you can continue to optimize your social media efforts.
I’d love to hear from you. What are some of the social media challenges you’ve encountered, and how did you overcome those challenges?
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