Social media has advanced the impact and reachability of messages – whether verbal, written, or visual – minimizing limitations on communication. It is an integral part of billions of people’s lives and has reshaped the way that we view ourselves and others.
Businesses, in particular, use social platforms to maintain their image and promote their products, and though we mainly associate marketing with said businesses, we also have the potential to market ourselves as individuals.
One fundamental idea of social media is that, in most cases, we can be selective with what to and what not to share. In other words, we can take the time to really think about and refine what we post and choose whether we post at all. This gives us a certain power: to create the image ourselves that we wish.
Of course, you should stay true to yourself, keeping in mind that your social media is an extension of who you are. Sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook can be just as critical as LinkedIn.
Here are few simple tips to get started or further develop:
Routinely introspect to determine whether your social media reflects who you are presently
Be selective with your words and images
Think of your social media as an extension of your resume
Stay true to yourself, but align your image with the group(s) that you are trying to “market” yourself to
Understand that different platforms attract different audiences; therefore, what you post should vary from one platform to another
Remember that social media is a tool beyond entertainment
Personal branding and maintaining an online identity can play a key role in professional development. When done right, you can set yourself apart from a sea of others!
Accounts of colleagues and frequent collaborators or research groups
Academic and lay publications covering your field
Professional organizations related to your field
Plan to post multiple times a week. Twitter is such a fast-moving medium that it can accommodate multiple posts a day – but that’s not necessary.
Great, sharable content includes publications, faculty and student awards, reports/images from the field, grant or funding opportunities, and more.
Consider not only sharing news from your department or unit, but also including a post every week or so that gives credit to others – something you’re reading and that influenced your thinking or really knocked you out.
Including graphics, images or Twitter cards greatly increases the engagement with your posts.
To ensure you can get picked up by other accounts – and because it’s the right thing to do – make sure to add “alt text” to images so that they’re accessible to people using screen readers.
For Trinity social media: Get the Twitter handle and icon added to the footer of your website by emailing trinitywebsupport@duke.edu. They can also help you integrate a scrolling feed in your homepage.
It’s only 280 characters and an image or three. How hard can it be? A well-crafted tweet takes time and thoughtfulness, as all social media-savvy communicators know. For those just getting started – or who simply need a refresher or reference list! – here are some best practices to consider before you press “Tweet.”
Have you checked your grammar and spelling? Is the copy clear and easy to read?
Does the tweet state what you want people to do and give them a way to do that? (Ex: A link to read more, a link to register)
How does what you’re sharing connect to your department or unit? If you don’t tell people, they won’t know! (Ex: “our faculty member” or “English student Kathryn Kennedy” or “program alum Quantá Holden” or “our course on…” or “an event/guest speaker we are hosting”)
Can any person you’re tweeting about be tagged? And if so, are they active? (Note: I generally consider activity within the last six months, and make sure there’s nothing that could be reputationally damaging in what they regularly share.)
Are there other departments, Duke entities or collaborators (universities, colleagues, journals, funding agencies) who should be tagged?
Have you included alt text for the image to serve users with screen readers?
We’ve found that a list like this can also be helpful in illustrating to non-communicators (i.e. your academic bosses and partners) all the work that goes into what may appear to be a simple type-and-post process. Happy tweeting!
Social media analytics is the process of tracking, collecting, and analyzing data from social networks. In University Communications, we use analytics to both understand social media performance and to inform future decisions about how we present and share content on our platforms.
Today, we’re going to talk about how we collect this valuable information, specifically on Twitter.
Twitter analytics shows you how your audience is responding to your content, what’s working, and what’s not. You can use data-driven insights to optimize your future content and get better results whether that’s more engagement, more website traffic, or more overall impressions.
When you first log in, you’ll see the account home page, which is basically a monthly Twitter report card. This page spotlights top-performing tweets and introduces you to influencers in your network:
Twitter Activity Dashboard
Although the Twitter analytics home page provides a nice overview, the best information (IMO) is on the Tweet Activity Dashboard. By clicking the “Tweet” tab, you’ll be able to track the number of impressions, engagements, and engagement rate for each and every Tweet you send:
For a more granular view of the volume of each type of engagement, you can click on the specific Tweet:
This allows you to suss out the specific types of engagements your Tweet received. For example, we know that a Tweet with a social media card will on average receive more link clicks than a Tweet with a photo and the link in the Twitter caption.
But the most useful feature (again IMO) is the ability to adjust the date range and export your data as a CSV file:
This feature allows you to sort through the exported data using Excel in ways that are impossible within the platform itself.
Now what?
There are several data columns in the export, so you can develop a customized analysis on whatever metric makes the most sense for your account strategy. Here are a couple common terms and definitions to get you started:
Impressions A total tally of all the times a Tweet has been seen.
Reach The number of users who saw an impression of your Tweet in their timeline. Twitter does not provide this metric in their analytics dashboard, so generally you would need a third-party tool to determine your reach.
Engagement A Twitter user’s interaction with a Tweet, including Retweets, replies, likes, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, or Tweet expansion.
Engagement Rate This varies slightly by platform, but for Twitter engagement rate is calculated by the number of engagements divided by impressions.
Clicks There are several kinds of Twitter “clicks” available in the downloaded analytics — user profile clicks, url clicks, hashtag clicks, etc. For our purposes, we track url clicks to determine the amount of traffic we’re driving to Duke websites.
We use Excel to aggregate our data so we can find common trends among our top Tweets, determine particular days/times that work best with our audience, and compare our performance year-over-year.
Duke University Social Media Twitter Analytics Summary Spreadsheet@DukeU Twitter Analytics Over TimeApril 2021 Analytics Monthly Snapshot
By understanding which content items get the most engagement, you can start seeing trends over time — and then applying those insights to future tweets — you’ll be able to better connect with your audience.
To get the most out of your social media efforts, you’ll want to make sure that your website links show up properly. So today, we’re going to talk about the importance of ensuring your website looks great on social media and provide the tools that’ll help enhance your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
You’re likely already aware that each page of your website should have a title tag and meta description for SEO reasons. But did you also realize you can specifically customize how your website content displays on social media platforms? The customizations are called social media cards and they make your content more engaging by adding images and summaries when you (or anyone else for that matter) share your links on social media.
Similar to the meta tags that tell programmatic robots (like Google) about the pages on your site, social media bots scan the page associated with your link to determine what info should be displayed with it in a user’s newsfeed. If the bots can’t find anything, they take their best guess. The results can vary from boring to comical. But by enabling social media cards on your website, you can control these meta tags so social media platforms accurately determine the title, description, and image that gets displayed.
The difference between a bare hyperlink and an engaging Tweet is a small bit of code on your link’s website.
In order for these lovely link previews to display on Twitter, your website must haveTwitter Cards enabled. Adding a few lines of markup on your website means links to your content will have a “Card” with photo, title, and description to help drive readers to your content.
There are technically four different types of Twitter cards, but the one we find most useful is “Summary Card with Large Image.”
Once the correct meta tags are added to your webpage (either by you or your website administrator), you can run the URL through thevalidator tool to test how the link will look on Twitter. This tool also works for any website if you’d like to see what a link would look like before Tweeting. This is helpful since sometimes websites use different images in their meta tags than appear on the site itself.
A few notes:
The most commonly recommended image size for social media cards is 1200×628 since this size fits on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For Twitter, you’ll want your image to be at least 300×157 and no bigger than 4096×4096.
Often, Twitter Cards are set to pull the first image on a page as a default. Be careful with this since Twitter will crop the image to make it fit the card. You might end up with a pixelated version or a vertical headshot where only the person’s nose is visible.
If you update the tags for your page (say you found a typo in your title or need to switch out the image), you’ll want to use the Twitter Card validator to force Twitter to do a fresh scrape of your page’s URL. This will cause Twitter to pull the new meta tag, ensuring that the most recent, accurate information is shared. Otherwise, Twitter might pull from an outdated cache instead.
Open Graph
Facebook and LinkedIn both generate link previews based on Open Graph meta tags. Like Twitter, if these Open Graph tags are missing or incomplete, the link preview will also be incomplete.
The Facebook Debugger is a great tool to see how a Facebook link will look before you post it. It’ll let you see all the information that the Facebook Crawler is pulling. Like Twitter, if you updated the image or preview text and it’s not displaying, click “Scrape Again” once or twice to force Facebook to get the updated information.
Recommendations from Facebook:
200×200 pixels is the minimum allowed image dimensions.
The image file size cannot exceed 8 MB.
If your image is smaller than 600×315 pixels, it’ll still display but the size will be much smaller.
When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook Crawler scrapes and caches the meta data from the URL. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered, which means the first person who shares your link won’t see a rendered image. You can pre-cache your images and avoid this by running the URL through the Debugger.
If you update the image, the original share will continue to show unless you refresh it in the post.
Since LinkedIn also used Open Graph tags, it functions much like Facebook. The LinkedIn Post Inspector works just like the Facebook Debugger. Paste your URL and select “Inspect” to see what your link will look like on LinkedIn.
So if your site doesn’t currently have social media cards, we’d highly recommend having them added.
If various reasons prevent the addition of social media cards to your website, you can still share your content on social media. It’s just a little bit harder.
Our recommendation is to share your text with the link and applicable image. Make sure to use the correct image size for the social media platform. Also, to meet accessibility standards, you’ll need to add alt text to the image. This can be done natively in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but only a few schedulers (Hootsuite, Sprout, etc.) have this feature. And lastly, we do have a Duke-branded link shortener available through Shib login.
So in summary, it’s key to properly manage your website content and how it displays on social media platforms rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn determine how it’s displayed for you. By optimizing Twitter Cards and Open Graph and validating the accuracy of your website content in how it’s displayed, you can curate your content specifically for each audience you have on different social channels.
Of all the social media platforms we’re going to discuss, Twitter is the medium most built for efficiency and speed. This is due to several mechanics.
First, Twitter limits its users to 280-character posts. Often seen as a hindrance, this is one of my favorite aspects. Twitter is the social media embodiment of William Strunk’s “Omit needless words” and actually forces you to make strategic edits to help capture attention in a concise manner. When I’m converting our website content to social media posts, I almost always start with Twitter because tweeting makes me get to the point and is often the best way to discover the “heart” of a story.
In turn, these bite-sized nuggets of information called Tweets make it possible for users to skim a lot of information really fast. Twitter’s feed is ordered, for the most part, chronologically (where Facebook and Instagram are decidedly not) which guarantees fast distribution (although not necessarily quality). The newest stuff is generally on top, making Twitter the place for what’s happening right now. Couple this with hashtags and trending topics and it’s not surprising Twitter is the preferred platform for breaking news.
And once that news is out there we arrive at the key player in the Twitter machine: the retweet button. At the heart of all social media platforms is the ability to share, and Twitter’s retweet mechanic is by far the most efficient example on the World Wide Web today.
Before 2009, Twitter users had to manually retweet each other by copying text, pasting it into a new window and physically typing RT before the OP’s handle all before hitting “send.” Twitter decided to build this behavior into its product — a standard practice in tech — and boy did they. Turns out, copying and pasting made people look more closely at what they shared and think about it just a smidge longer. But the retweet button has eliminated that friction and thus exacerbated outrage-sparked sharing and the wanton spread of misinformation.
[Side note: Facebook took notice and, due to their lack of viralability in the 2012 election, decided to add their version of a RT: the share button. Let’s put a pin in that and come back to it.]
So what does this mean for communicators? First, anyone using Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about their use of language due to the character limit. This functionality has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication. Also, please be advised that navigating the brevity of Twitter lingo does take practice in the actual medium. Re-using website text just isn’t going to cut it.
Second, Twitter moves quickly and thus timing influences your success on the platform almost as much as the content itself. When faced with a breaking news type story, you have two choices: Break the news yourself or have Twitter break the news for you. (There are definite pros and cons to both strategies, but for this blog we’re assuming you want to be in control of your own story.)
And lastly, because Twitter is so fast and content is so easily shareable the platform can be responsible for fueling the momentum of false news. MIT researchers found that false news on Twitter spread faster, deeper and more widely than true news. Unfortunately, it’s not just influencers and Russian bots to blame; it’s ordinary Twitter users, with modest followings, who have a bias for the “sensational, unverified, emotional and false” … amplified by the millions. For communicators, this means keeping a vigilant eye out and constantly combatting the untrue.
Well, that’s all for now. Next up, Facebook. Until then 👋
Fifty-six years ago, scholar Marshall McLuhan published “Understanding Media,” and 14 years ago I was assigned to read it as part of an undergraduate elective course, “Media, Culture and Society.” Clocking in at over 500 pages, McLuhan’s seminal work is a bit of a doorstop, but the text’s best-known phrase — “The medium is the message” — is one I haven’t forgotten. Even though McLuhan’s theory predates the digital age, his work still provides perspective on new communication platforms such as social media.
What McLuhan meant by this expression was that the actual content (i.e. this blog post) is beholden to the medium through which it’s being delivered (i.e. the computer or smartphone on which you’re currently reading). That is, the technology delivering the message (i.e. your printing presses, TVS, radios, websites, so forth and so on) inherently change how we communicate and, in so doing, alter or even supersede the message.
One of the most famous historical examples is the 1960 Richard Nixon/John F. Kennedy debate. TV audiences thought the good-looking JFK emerged victorious, while radio listeners believed Nixon to be the victor. (Some even go so far as to state that Kennedy would never have been president without the medium of television.) Same content, but what people thought had happened was very different depending on the medium they were using.
A more recent example is the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical CATS, whose stage version featuring elaborate costumes and much-lauded choreography appealed to millions for years, while its CGI-laden cinematic counterpart, well, didn’t.
Back to the matter at hand, all this is to say that the way your audience interprets, understands and engages with your content is influenced heavily by the platform you’re using and how you’re using it. From Facebook’s live video to Instagram’s filters to Twitter’s character limit, it’s important to look at each platform as a unique opportunity when crafting a story and to use each platform’s unique parameters to help shape your message. The rest of this blog series will examine how the technology behind each social media platform influences the way its users interpret its messages.
So what does this mean for communicators? First, anyone using Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about their use of language due to the character limit. This functionality has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication. Also, please be advised that navigating the brevity of Twitter lingo does take practice in the actual medium. Re-using website text just isn’t going to cut it.
With coronavirus dominating the headlines recently and disrupting daily life for millions of people in China and beyond, there has been renewed attention to the significant role the platform WeChat plays in information sharing in China.
What is WeChat?
In short, WeChat is a social media network, messaging app, e-commerce platform, and more, all in one app. It’s become ubiquitous in daily life in China – with more than 1.1 billion active users.
How do universities use WeChat?
Importantly for communicators, WeChat is also the first place many users will turn for official news and updates – before looking at an institution’s website, or checking their email.
At Duke, we have more students and alumni from China than from any other country outside of the United States. Because Chinese internet restrictions generally prevent prospective students, parents, alumni and others in China from accessing our other social media channels, we’ve been active on Weibo (another prominent Chinese social network) since 2011, and we launched our WeChat presence in 2015.
In addition to posting stories and updates and promoting admissions information sessions in China, we’ve successfully used WeChat groups to host live chat sessions for admitted students – most of whom aren’t able to visit campus before enrolling – who are eager to learn more about life on campus or connect with other students. And it’s an important way our Chinese alumni community stays in touch with one another and the university – there are a number of active Duke alumni chat groups in which members are sharing news and information with each other on a daily basis.
For our communications
colleagues at Duke Kunshan University, a joint-venture university founded in
2014 in Kunshan, China, WeChat is even more critical to their work. In addition
to sharing stories on the university’s public-facing profile on the platform,
the university uses private WeChat groups to connect incoming students,
communicate quickly with and build community among parents, and as a practical
tool for the small but growing staff and faculty community to share news and
updates.
In addition to
its instant-messaging function, another useful component for communicators is
WeChat Moments. Similar to Facebook, users can post pictures, story links and
other updates to their feed for all (or selected) connections to view, “like”
and forward, potentially boosting the reach of their content.
If you’re curious
about how you might use WeChat to support your connections to Chinese students,
parents or alumni, I’d encourage you to talk with your students and alumni who
are active on WeChat to learn how they use it. You can dip a toe in the water
by following some brands (many American and international brands are quite
active there) and universities to get a sense for how they are using the
platform. And don’t hesitate to reach out to our team (socialmedia@duke.edu) with questions about this work.
I feel like YouTube has been a part of my higher ed stump speech for a couple of years now, but this year, we’re finally getting to implement some of the goals we’ve had around YouTube here at Duke for a while now. Allow me to explain.
We’ve decided that YouTube isn’t just a bucket for holding video content. It’s actually social media. I’ll show you what I mean. Get in, loser.
Lots of higher ed institutions and brands use YouTube to house their video content so that they can embed it in other places, like on their website. YouTube works great for that, but there are so many more things that you can do with YouTube. Let me show you.
Not bad, and I really love Doritos as a brand. BUT, here’s the YouTube channel page of one of my favorite YouTubers, Mamrie Hart.
Looks different, right?
We’ve got the Doritos brand account, which basically just holds their video content that they’ve already created for somewhere else, like TV or their website. It isn’t using all of the YouTube channel page features, including custom thumbnails and end cards. Plus it has weird titles on the videos.
(If you haven’t seen Mean Girls, please ignore all my gif jokes.)
Now look at the YouTuber channel page. Mamrie is producing content with a series model so subscribers know what they’re going to get, she’s using YouTube’s interactive features, she’s got a featured video in the feature hole on her channel page, and she’s got branded thumbnails. Let’s break all of these down a bit more.
Series Model Content
Why would you want content in a series model? Well, one of the goals of YouTube is to get subscribers, and one way to do that is to have content that your potential subscribers can expect to see. We want our subscribers to be obsessed with our content.
Crash Course does an amazing job with series. They have lots of different series on their channel, but they’re all branded a little bit differently and they all stay on topic. You can have as many series as you want on your channel, and series content is what’s really going to get those subscribe clicks.
What kind of content should you be creating? Well, rather than re-inventing the wheel, check out Matt Gielen’s The Taxonomy of YouTube Videos. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about what kinds of content work best on YouTube.
Explainers tend to work well for the higher ed space, so a couple of our new series will be this type of video. Extra Credit is a series we’ve recently launched. Here’s one episode:
Channel Optimization
There are lots of ways to optimize your YouTube channel, beyond just what kind of content you create. Here are the secrets to optimizing your YouTube channel:
Descriptions
Your descriptions should be, well, descriptive. That means that they should say what’s actually in the video and use keywords that people might use to discover your video. Remember, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, behind only Google. Get those keywords in there! Search engines read just like humans do, so be sure to put the most important words and concepts at the beginning of the description.
Captions
Captioning your videos is not only important for accessibility, but also for Search Engine Optimization. YouTube actually reads the captions you generate to serve up better search results for people. Also, it’s just plain nice to caption your videos. Be a good citizen. Caption your videos.
Titles
Titles are really important for the search function on YouTube, too. One mistake I see people make with series content is putting the name of the series first before the content of the video. This gives the name of the series more weight in the search algorithm, when really people are probably searching for the actual content of your video, not the series name. Here’s how LEGO titled one of their videos in the Rebrickulous series:
You’ll note that important keywords like “LEGO” and “Challenge” come before the name of the series.
Thumbnails
The thumbnails for your video are part of the language of YouTube, and you’re just going to look like you know what you’re doing better on YouTube if you create YouTube-esque thumbnails. As in the LEGO example above, thumbnails usually have lots of bright colors, pictures of action and people’s faces, and the title of the video. They should look good in a small format. Pro tip: Don’t put your logo or watermark in the bottom right corner, because the time stamp for the video will always go in that corner on the thumbnail.
WVU has some of the most excellent higher ed thumbnails I’ve ever seen.
End Screens
Ok, let’s talk about end screens. I have feelings about end screens. A lot of feelings.
End screens are a YouTube-only functionality. If you’re using end screens, it tells YouTube viewers that you created this content for them, not for all of your other platforms. It tells them that YouTube isn’t an afterthought, but a strategy for you.
Bonus, you can also get some Call-To-Actions in your end screens and I know you marketers get all happy about that stuff. (I’m a marketer too, so I can say that.) Most end screens include a subscribe button and links to a couple other videos that people might like to watch after watching what they just saw. Here’s ours for the Extra Credit video I embedded above:
Changing How We Promote Video
Normally when we put video up on social media, it makes the most sense to direct-upload the video file to whatever channel we’re going to use (Facebook or Twitter or whatever). The channel algorithms highly favor direct uploads because it keeps people on that platform rather than sending them somewhere else.
But what do you do when you’ve got a YouTube-first strategy and want people to interact with end screens and hit the subscribe button? Well, you change how you work a bit.
Embedding is, of course, the easiest way to promo YouTube videos. If you’re embedding the YouTube video, you don’t lose any of the functionality like end screens and captions, and all of the views get counted in your YouTube analytics, no matter where the video is embedded.
For Facebook, we’ve done a bit of experimenting, and it seems to work best to link to a Duke Today story where we’ve embedded the video, rather than linking straight to YouTube. The algorithm favors our website over YouTube for some reason.
For Twitter and Instagram, we’re running really cool preview videos, formatted for the platform and using a link to the full YouTube video.
Is stress always bad?
Professor @bmartinhard discusses how reframing our ideas about stress can reduce its harmful impacts
Our preliminary data says YES, we’re getting more views compared to our typical non-series videos, and picking up more subscriptions to our channel, but we’ll get back to you when we have more numbers. We’re still in the early stages of experimenting with YouTube this way, but we’re super excited about it and we hope you will be too.
Last year’s team of editors (I don’t have a group pic yet this year because several of our editors are studying abroad!)
We have approximately one student editor per @DukeStudents channel. I say approximately because we have a couple of people who run multiple channels, and our Instagram channel has two editors. (It works better that way for content flow.) One of these editors is our editor-in-chief, who runs strategy, analytics, and the process of keeping everyone on track. We’ve found it works a lot better when we let them be in charge of each other. I’m basically just there in case they get stuck on something.
These editors are paid! We meet in person (or via Google Hangouts for the study abroad students) once every two weeks, but the rest of their work is done off-site whenever they have time. We keep things organized on a team Slack. We try really hard not to over-schedule them. They do a lot remotely and they work different hours than I do, so it works better for everyone this way.
You might be surprised to know that the student editors have full control over their respective accounts. That means that they don’t have to submit drafts to anyone for review, and they are allowed to choose and curate what they want to post! (More on how we make that work later.)
We also have a team of content contributors. They are mostly underclassmen and are unpaid. There are about 40 of them! We meet with them once a month and keep in touch online via GroupMe. They’re each assigned one of the paid editors as their mentor for a set period of time, and then they rotate to a different editor. This gives them exposure to a lot of different social media channels. Their job is to contribute content to the editors for each of the different channels. Eventually, we hire our student editors from this group, so being a content contributor is almost part of the interview process to be a student editor.
Here are the rules:
People usually gasp and clutch their pearls when I tell them the students don’t have to submit drafts to me before they post, but we do have a pretty solid set of time-tested rules that all of the editors know and follow. I do read their posts once they go up, and on the rare occasion I have to ask them to take something down, but they’re actually usually even more careful than I would be with the rules I’ve given them.
The rules go thusly:
The “Grandma Rule:” If your grandma wouldn’t want to see it, don’t post it.
No references to alcohol, parties, drugs (and no red Solo cups, no matter what’s in them)
Nothing dangerous
No content promoting Greek or SLG organizations (This is because we don’t want to accidentally play favorites, so it’s just easier to not promote any of them.)
No profanity, including phrases like “AF,” or hashtags that contain profanity (like #GTHC and #DDMF)
Do not insult other schools, even in reference to sports
Follow NCAA athlete recruitment rules
Do not answer admissions questions. Always redirect to Admissions!
These rules really take care of most of the problems we might have with what to post and what not to post. It really helps to begin a group like this with the rules in mind so that you can be clear about expectations. We’ve found that once the expectations are established, the more freedom we can give them, the better. More freedom equals more creativity!
It’s also helpful to remember that they are students, and students are human, and humans mess up sometimes. They’re going to mess up. (To be fair, so are you.) So with that in mind, make sure that you have a plan in place for when they mess up or need help and a way they can contact you anytime.
Hiring:
I mentioned above that we hire to our paid student editors team from the pool of content creators. This gives us at least an academic year to make a determination about whether the student is enthusiastic about @DukeStudents or not, and we’re hiring for enthusiasm, not necessarily skill. You can teach skills. (Doing social media isn’t brain surgery, guys– hate to break it to you.) You cannot teach enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm!
Other ways students can help you:
If you don’t want to set up social media that your students can run on their own, there are lots of other ways to use the talent of your students:
Use them as a focus group! They know really cool stuff. Ask them about new social media channels and how they use social media.
Have them collect content for you! Most of them already know how to shoot great video on their phones and have an eye for what will work in an Instagram feed.
Occasionally make them do boring stuff. No one likes spreadsheets, but let’s be real. You’re the grown-up here and it won’t kill them to copy-paste for a couple of hours.
In conclusion, students are awesome!
Get yourself a team of them and see how much more fun they make your job!
