Social Media Directories
Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 4:00pm -- Holly Wright
Over the last few years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn have clearly emerged as the giants of social media. But many of the more specialized and niche social media platforms also have a very large audience, and most social media-embracing organizations have adopted one or more of these non-core social networks.
Last month, hundreds of universities claimed their Google+ brand pages. Last week Emory posted a link to their Pinterest pinboard, complete with student photos, an Emory Christmas ornament, and other interesting finds from around the web. And today, over a dozen of the higher education clients we follow on Twitter posted new photos to their YouTube channels. This enthusiastic adoption of so many different social accounts poses a problem, though. How do your followers know where to look for you?
Cross-socializing, or promoting some of your social accounts on your other social accounts, can be beneficial where it makes sense. Posting a youtube video to Facebook or Google+, linking to your blog from your LinkedIn account, and telling people about your Pinterest board on Twitter all help, to an extent. But I’ve recently noticed another important way to get the word out, especially for those people actively seeking you out: Social Media Directories.
In addition to the primary social media links on most homepages, many colleges and universities have created entire directories for their social media accounts. Take the total number of colleges, sports, clubs and departments at a university and multiply that by the number of different social media channels being used, and you can easily see why a directory is so useful for students, alumni,fans, and all your other stakeholders.
Examples
Thinking about creating a social media directory for your organization? Here are some examples from our client base:
Michigan State University Social Media Directory
Albright College Social Media Directory
Philadelphia University Social Media Directory
William & Mary Social Media Directory
Emory University Social Media Directory
Many of the others I found are arranged in a grid format like the Emory, Albright and MSU directories above. One style that I find particularly interesting is the William & Mary directory. It's organized into three categories: Official, Official-ish and Unofficial. These categories each have their own page and are easy to navigate and elegant in appearance. One of the other important features that most of the examples include is a link for people to submit other accounts to the directory.
How do you keep your social media accounts organized? We'd love to see your social media directories, so please feel free to share them in the comments area below.
Category
- Resources