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Social Media Efficiency

If you’re doing social media for higher ed, chances are you’re also doing lots of other things. We’re famously over-burdened with communications duties. Fear not, though. I’m here to help give some guidance on how you can do the social media part of your job faster and better.

Use a social dashboard.

I’m not here to sell you a product, but using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer (even the free versions!) can really help you streamline your process. Instead of making sure you’re sitting by your computer to hit the tweet button when it’s time, or worse, tweeting randomly when you have a few minutes between phone calls and meetings, a tool like this will help you plan out your day or week of content and will send out your content when you schedule it to go out. You’re not off the hook on monitoring any responses, but at least you don’t have to remember to press Publish each time!

If you’re working with a team, some kind of social dashboard also helps you keep track of what everyone else is doing. You can share a login and all take turns, or if you have a little money, you can buy multiple “seats” on a platform like Hootsuite.

Another advantage to using something like this is that it gives you a monitoring/listening dashboard. I like to use mine to look at several Twitter lists at once, all in columns next to each other.

Get an editorial calendar.

Again, I’m not here to sell you software, and it doesn’t matter what tool you use as long as you’re using it properly and getting the other members of your team to use it properly. An editorial calendar can be as simple as sticky notes on a whiteboard or as complicated as a big project management system.

The goal is to let everyone on your team see what content everyone else is producing and when it will be published. As a social media coordinator, having other people show you what their content is and where it will be published will save you so much time! After all, it’s your job to share all of that tasty content.

At University Communications, we use Trello, but you can use whatever works well for your team.

Trello has a nice calendar view that’s helpful to see, too.

Get quicker about image sizing.

If you’re working on social media, you’re probably spending a fair amount of time resizing images for use on your different platforms for posts, banners, profile images and all kinds of other things. Check out the always up-to-date social media image sizes cheat sheet from Sprout, and keep in mind that if you have a horizontal image already, you’ll be mostly ok.

I’m also a heavy user of Canva.com, which is a whole ton easier to figure out than, say, Photoshop.

You can make pretty, professional-looking graphics like this in just a few minutes on Canva.

Use tools to make your life easier!

Here are some of my favorites:

Photography:

VSCO – Photo editing app
Plotaverse – Animate your photos
Flixel – Animated photos
Snapseed – Photo editing app (iPhone or Android)
Werble – Animated photos
MaskArt – Using a video, make a still photo with a little motion on it (called a cinemagraph).
PICOO Camera – Another cinemagraph creation app.

Video:

Open Broadcaster Software – Free video recording and live streaming software                 
Filmic Pro – Video recording app with more functionality than the native iPhone app
LumaFusion – video editing app (like FinalCut, but on your phone)
CutStory – cut video into 15-second chunks for Instagram Stories (iPhone app)

Analytics:

Google Analytics – free website analytics
CrowdTangle – track social media activity on a website/article
Tweriod – figure out when your Twitter followers are online

If you’re at Duke, we also have a big, huge, crowd-sourced list that we add to all the time. (You have to join the Duke Communicators Facebook group to see the doc.)

Hope that helps create some more space for your other job functions or even just a few minutes to be more creative with your content during the day! Feel free to comment below with your own tips and tricks for social media efficiency.

Our Favorite Instagram Stories of the Year

2016 saw the advent of Instagram Stories (see our early take on it here) and it’s been full steam ahead for the feature ever since. Instagram Stories turn 2 years old today and show no sign of slowing down as a major media asset for the social platform. They have been especially powerful for brands and influencers, Duke included, as a driver of traffic to our content. In fact, Instagram Stories is our second most powerful referrer for content, behind Facebook.

We’ve experimented with creative storytelling from research stories to crowd-sourced content on our Stories this year. Here are a few of our favorites:

Trajan Forum

Working with the Stories features has really pushed us in terms of creativity and discovering new tools and skills. This piece we produced on how historians and archeologists use 3-D scanning to document and archive pieces of long-gone ancient structures really pushed us in terms of how to get the content in the format that we needed. I ended up taking screen recordings on my iPhone of the 3-D scans, moving them around with my finger using the functionality on the webpage they were stored on. Then I manually edited the clips within the iPhoto album to shave off the front bumper that would show me navigating to the proper screen. After that, I exported and emailed them to Sonja to fine tune in Final Cut Pro X for proper formatting for the vertical Stories layout. (This was prior to the resize feature introduction.) It was really great to highlight such a cool story and bring it to our broader audience in an interactive and tangible way via Stories.

American Ballet Theater Partnership

This was one of our first attempts at strategic storytelling using a Call to Action on Instagram Stories. It worked well because of the stunning visuals our colleagues provided, and it paired really well with a conveniently-timed beta-testing of animated video/GIF capabilities on Canva, our go-to tool for quick, easy, polished graphics.

Snow Day 2018

I love this one because it is the perfect example of crowdsourcing content at its finest. ICYMI, Durham had a few major snow days back in January and campus got a good bit of snow. The photographic results were stunning. The best part? Sonja and I compiled this content from users from the comfort of our couches in our PJs as everyone was snowed in for a couple days. Thankfully, our students didn’t let us miss out on content showcasing Duke as a winter wonderland. There was no call to action here, just a great opportunity to engage with our community by featuring their content on our feed. You can see the full feature on the highlight on our Instagram page.

Moving into the upcoming school year, we’re excited to continue experimenting with content and storytelling on this platform.

How Duke Welcomed the Class of 2022

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

When the early decision deadline was approaching, Duke’s communications team asked me to come up with an idea to welcome the class in a friendly, fun way. I spent hours on Youtube watching other admissions videos, figuring out if there was a perfect recipe to get people excited for a school I already loved so much. It seemed impossible to nail down a video – there were so many different videos online, I had no idea how to replicate.

I realized, though, that I shouldn’t be replicating – that different videos reflected schools’ personalities. The engineering schools boasted crazy tech videos. At arts schools, dancers leaped across the screen in perfect pirouettes.

 

But, Duke has a little bit of everything. So what makes us different?

 

I thought back to why I came to Duke in the first place. And it clicked – it was the people.

It was this beautiful sense of community that drew me into Duke in the first place, that embraced me with open arms, that made my first moments on campus feel like I was sliding into a warm, comfy sweater that I had owned my whole life. And it’s this sense of community that makes Duke different than any other school out there.

I wanted to capture that in a video. A video that screamed at new students, “Hello!  This is what you get at Duke. You get these people, this family. And you’re going to love it!”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bcs7ZngDahk/?taken-by=dukeuniversity

There started my week of walking around campus with my camera. I’d see my friends, and before they could even say hello to me, I’d ask, “Hey, could I borrow you for a second? Could you just say ‘Welcome to Duke’ on camera for me?”’ Their eyebrows would initially furrow, but the look of confusion would be replaced in seconds by a look of genuine happiness, often excitement. “Of course,” almost every person would echo back to me as they got ready for their closeup.

And that’s the beauty of media, especially social media. Sure, social media lets us connect with old friends and new friends, share spring break pictures and tweet funny jokes for friends, but at the crux of it all, it’s about people connecting with people. This video not only gave me an opportunity to connect with the incoming students but also created a bridge for new students to connect with each other and their future home.

 

Challenges

Getting people to participate was, like I said, easy – everyone wanted to welcome new students. The editing, however, proved time-consuming, and I worked on the video over the course of two weeks. My two major challenges:  

  1. Music. For making videos, sometimes half the battle is finding the right music for the background. The music has to match the mood, or else, one risks ruining a video. Finding music that encompassed this “Welcome” vibe was harder than I thought – I spent an hour listening to different instrumentals on Youtube before I found something that worked. Everything else was too cheesy, too intense, too fast, too slow, etc.                                    
  2. Multiple shots in a frame: there were so many shots of people that I could put in the video, I was left wondering, how do I put in as many as possible? This led to me shrinking and stretching the video shots to different sizes, in order to fit more than one shot in a frame. I ended up doing this multiple times in the video because it really emphasized the idea of Duke community. I use Final Cut Pro, and to adjust these shapes I used the Transform tool (circled in yellow). This allowed me to size and move clips accordingly (yellow arrow).

Overall, this video was a blast to make. While some hurdles cost me more time than I expected, the reward was worth it. Getting to play a role in welcoming new students to campus put a smile on my face, as it did with every single person I filmed.

Welcome, class of 2022 – see you soon.

Using Canva Animator to Make Even More Awesome Content

One of our social media secret weapons is the online tool Canva, especially since the advent of Instagram Stories last year. Our office relies pretty heavily upon the tool for stylized, easy to build graphics, and now, animated video content as well.

I recently had the opportunity to demo the new Canva beta animations tool on Duke’s Instagram Stories to highlight a very exciting partnership between the university and the American Ballet Theatre.

Canva is a great tool if you’ve got really visual content to accompany any text about your story or research that you want to highlight. In this case, we were fortunate to have some incredible dance photos at our disposal. I knew I wanted to highlight these images and push people to the story via Instagram Stories.

Enter, Canva. The great thing about this tool is its user-friendliness. I was able to login to our office account and design slides using photos and text, just as I would ordinarily. The difference comes in when it is time to export your slides. You’ll notice that there is a new option under “Download” in the top, right navigation bar. Select this new option, “Animated GIF/Movie,” then click “Preview Animation.”

 

This will open the Animator tool:

From here, you can select from any of the six options or “styles” on the right for your animations, which will be demoed on the slides you have created. Once you are satisfied with your selected animation form, you have the option to download them as either a GIF or .mp4 file. For example, @DukeUEnergy recently used the tool to create a GIF that they rolled out on Twitter:

 

For the purpose of our Instagram Stories, I selected “Download as Movie.”  Then the file will be downloaded to your computer. Here is our final product:

 

We’re not quite done yet. Because all four slides were created in one Canva document and not individually downloaded, they exported into one, 28-second long video. Instagram Stories will only allow 10-second long clips for each part of the story. So I had to do a bit of tedious editing on my end. First, I emailed the .mp4 file to my iPhone. Then, I went into my camera roll and edited the whole video down into separate clips featuring each slide. I saved each edited segment as a new video file, so as not to lose the original 28-second video. The end result was 4, 7-10 second long videos featuring only one of each of the animated slides. I was then able to upload these, in order, to our Instagram Stories.

The result when it played back was one seamless “video” on our Stories. With the video broken into 4 separate parts, I was also able to attach a link on to each segment of our Story that sent viewers directly to the Duke Today article about the partnership. The end result can be viewed on Instagram’s mobile interface as a feature on @DukeUniversity‘s account.

This whole process took me less than an hour. With a little creativity to work around the Stories time limit function, Canva Animator is a really great tool to easily make videos with a highly produced feel with (very little, at least on my part) video skill.

Animoji in Motion: How Duke Announced the 2018 Commencement Speaker

Commencement season is one of my favorite parts of working in higher ed communications. Gearing up to send a fresh batch of Dukies out into the world, all glowing with accomplishment and brimming with promise, makes for a lot of work and long days, but is one of the most personally gratifying projects I work on each year.

And when your boss hands down the task of coming up with an innovative new way to announce this year’s commencement speaker, it’s time to get pretty creative. After all, we announce a commencement speaker every year, and we’ve done it the same way for as long as anyone can remember. But at Duke, we like to think of ourselves as “big idea people.” We aim for the Pie In The Sky and see where we land. We’re also fortunate to have an extremely supportive team of leaders who encourage us to think BIG and run with it. And this time we really went for it.

We learned that Apple CEO Tim Cook would be this year’s commencement speaker only a few weeks after the launch of the iPhone X, which gave Apple’s jazzy Animoji ads just enough time to make the rounds on social media. In our team’s brainstorming meeting, I threw out the idea of making something similar to announce Cook as this year’s speaker and things snowballed from there into the end result: two students and Duke President Vincent Price – and their Animojis – introducing Cook as our commencement speaker.

We could have rolled the video on our social channels and left it at that, but since we really wanted to make a splash with the students, we arranged to have the video on the jumbotron at Cameron Indoor Stadium during a Duke men’s basketball game.  And the reaction was better than we could have ever hoped for.

What everyone didn’t see was the weeks of hard work and late nights that went into making this project. Here’s a look at some of the behind-the-scenes work (and play) that made the magic happen:

Duke’s Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Sonja Foust, playing guinea pig for our lighting test.

Sanford School of Public Policy MPP candidate Kavya Sakar films with her Animoji.

Senior Matthew King during filming.

Really testing out that facial recognition software.

Even Duke’s President Vincent Price was game.  Behold, a series:

And here’s a look at how those of us not lucky enough to be designated as “talent” spent the day:

Special thanks to our hosts for the day of filming in Blue Devil Tower, Chad Lampman, Executive Director of the Blue Devil Network.

Kristen Brown, AVP of News, Communications & Media, gives the Animojis a try in between filming. We’re big fans of the bunny.

Taking my job as Chief Fly Away Wrangler v seriously.

Me (appalled at how we are STILL in the studio some 9 hours later) along with Duke’s AVP of News & Global Communications, Laura Brinn, and VP for Public Affairs and Government Relations, Mike Schoenfeld, who loved watching the process from the monitors as President Price recorded his lines.

 

 

 

How Duke Students Welcomed the First Members of #Duke2021

For the 861 student applicants who got good news about their admission to Duke University Wednesday night, the acceptance notice was just the beginning of the welcome they received.

For the Devil’s Advocates, a Duke student social media team working with the Office of News and Communications, the notices were a highlight of weeks of work to create social media graphics and digital swag and to electronically greet the students.

Here’s a replay of how last night played out:

PREPARATION

The Advocates oversee @DukeStudents accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, tumblr, and Snapchat. When the Early Decision notices went live online at 7 p.m. Wednesday, the team was ready with personal greetings to the first acceptances of the Class of 2021.

Most of the greetings carried best wishes, but there was some early advice as well:

“When you arrive, make sure to talk to those around you; their life stories may be eerily similar or wildly different, and each person you come across will have something valuable to teach you. Keep your ears and heart open, and you’ll learn just as much from them as you will in class.” Jair Oballe, Class of 2019

The Advocates helped the Class of 2021 celebrate their news with a Spotify “Happy Dance” playlist around the theme of admitted students being “The One,” a playlist that had no problem fitting in Orleans and Olivia Newton-John as well as more contemporary singers.

Leading up to 7 p.m., current Duke students shared words of encouragement and their own memories:

 

At 7 PM

When the admissions notices went live online at 7 p.m., Twitter was immediately filled with admitted students sharing their good news and posting photographs of their letter of admission (with their addresses blacked out). The first admitted student to tweet with the hashtag #Duke2021 was Michael Castro.

 

The @DukeStudents Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat accounts immediately started sending congratulations and welcome messages to admitted students.

THE REST OF THE EVENING

Soon after the Class of 2021 started the celebration, parents, siblings and Dukies joined in:

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag tweeted: “Loving these #duke2021 tweets. Congrats to the first Blue Devils of 2017!” At one point, #Duke2021 was trending on Twitter in Durham.

To wrap the celebration up, the Devil’s Advocates ended the evening with this tweet:

This was originally published on Duke Today. 

Getting a Handle on Global Duke

Last year, Duke alumni lived in 162 countries, some of which were so unfamiliar to me that I wouldn’t have been able to find them on a map. Thousands of Duke faculty and staff members travel internationally each year, and Duke students—nearly half of whom study abroad—might even have that number beat.

The Duke community is exceptionally international, and the university’s global programs and partnerships are so numerous that it’s often a challenge to keep up.

Enter the Duke Global Baton

The Duke Global Baton is a collaborative photo project showcasing the Duke community’s travels, adventures and daily lives around the world, all in one place.

We recruited a virtual relay team of students, faculty, staff and alumni to “pass the baton” around the world, highlighting the university’s widespread global engagement.

Every two days, a new Blue Devil takes over the account. One day the account may be with a PhD student researching malaria in a remote Amazonian community, and the next with an alumni travel group searching for lemurs in Madagascar.

By Duke, for Duke

This project creates an inclusive space for Duke people to share their global experiences and allows the wider Duke community to see the world through the lens (literally) of their classmates, mentors, colleagues and friends.

Other Duke community members who are not part of the relay team are invited to contribute to this gallery of global experiences by using the hashtag #DukeIsEverywhere, and hundreds of people have done so throughout the summer.

With a diverse group of participants taking over the account from 31 countries in six continents, Duke people are able to see the huge range of international opportunities available to them at Duke.

Goals:

  • Provide a one-stop look at a range of university activity.
  • Showcase Duke’s global activities in a visually engaging and emotionally compelling way.
  • Position Duke as a globally focused university.
  • Encourage engagement with the #DukeIsEverywhere hashtag.

Lessons Learned

  • Plan in advance, and have a backup if plans fall through.
  • Understand that giving up control over the account comes with risks, but also results in spontaneity and fresh voices.
  • Set clear guidelines.
  • Ask people why they want to participate to determine whether their goals are aligned with the campaign.
  • Engage an undergraduate to run the project; this year’s coordinator, Tamara Frances (Duke ‘18) brings enthusiasm for social media, knowledge of Duke, and familiarity with Instagram best practices to the table.

Our Accomplishments

By hiring a tech-savvy undergraduate to coordinate the account behind the scenes, collaborating and cross promoting with other social media campaigns on campus, designing digital flyers to promote the account at Duke, and launching a #DukeIsEverywhere photo contest, we’ve surpassed the 1,000 follower mark; represented more than 40 Duke schools, initiatives and programs; and engaged 54 participants to bring Duke Global to life.

Medium: An Explainer on a New Platform for Duke University

What is it?
Medium is a blogging platform started by the founder of Blogger and Twitter. It is a place to write and publish. It’s also super easy to use and edit.

How it works.
Anyone can start a free account and start publishing their writing. Writers can publish to their own profiles, or they can publish their writing on publications. Writers can create their own publications and/or contribute to publications that curate stories. Medium has an existing network of writers, so communities form easily and writers can follow each other’s work.

You can find and follow people and publications using Medium’s search. Comments in Medium are left in the margins, which is a great way to create an interactive reading experience. You can also recommend articles that you like.

Screen Shot 2016-08-16 at 11.03.25 AM

Content.
Medium is wide-open as far as topics. Writers publish both short-form and long-form and stories vary in tone, format and topic. You can insert photos and videos in a Medium story to make it more visually compelling.

Audience.
Writers and readers on Medium vary. Some are bloggers and journalists. Some are experts on
a certain thing. And some are just curious people who want to tell their stories.

A full 95% of Medium‘s readers are college graduates, and 43% of them earn six figures or more. Even better, from an advertiser standpoint, these readers are also young, with half of them in the coveted 18-34 demographic and 70% of them being under the age of 50.  — From this article.

32% of Medium readers are from the United States, followed by 12% from India, and a combined 14% from the UK/Germany/France. — From Alexa.

People and Publications to Follow.

And its users are some heavy hitters: The Gates Foundation uses Medium to post updates on the latest charity work. The White House posted the State of the Union address on Medium ahead of the event. Google (GOOG) just started using the service to promote its “Ideas” blog. — From CNN

Here are some of my current favorite Medium publications:

Should you use Medium?
Are you just getting started with a blog? Medium has a huge built-in audience.
Are you new to blogging? Medium is really easy to use.
Are you looking to get more readers on what you are already writing? Medium might make sense for you to use in addition to op-eds and existing blogs you are publishing.

How are Duke people using Medium?
There are a handful of Duke professors who publish their opinions and findings to Medium.

Duke University has just launched a publication where we plan to pull in these stories as well
as:

  • Faculty opinion pieces, especially thought-provoking pieces that may not be quite right
    for an op-ed, or that may have missed the short window of the news cycle, but would still be of interest to readers
  • Posts that distill faculty research expertise in a ready-friendly format, such as this post explaining work that was published in 2015 but is relevant to current conversations and political debate
  • First-person essays and posts related to the experiences of students, faculty and staff
  • Institutional opinion or perspective from senior leaders regarding policy issues, current events, or other current topics

Duke University's official publication on Medium

Duke University’s official publication on Medium

Have a Medium account? Let us know by emailing the #DukeSocial team.

More Reading
How to Use Medium: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing, Publishing & Promoting on the Platform, from Hubspot

Medium for Business: The Complete Guide for Marketers, by Social Media Examiner

How to do Medium Well, by News for Authors

Snapchat: How Duke Communicators Can Join the Fun

By now, we’ve all at least heard of Snapchat.

It’s the crazy popular app (currently the #1 free app on the Apple App Store) that allows users to share videos or photos that disappear within 24 hours. As of today, it’s the second most active social media network, behind only Facebook.

For marketers though, it’s still the Wild West out there; success metrics on Snapchat are so slim that there’s confusion on what content strategies work. For example, as of today there’s still no easy way to see how many followers you have. Still, the potential for cultivating a captive audience on the platform is worth taking seriously.

 

So What?

The rise of Snapchat has three larger implications for higher education communications:

1. It coincides with a trend toward social messaging. Interestingly, while we tend to think of Snapchat as a social media network, the company itself describes it as a messaging platform.

2. Content on Snapchat is posted in real-time, so it’s inherently timely. That’s no accident. For example, there’s no equivalent of a profile page, and no space to describe who you are. So the only meaningful thing users see when they follow you is whatever you posted in the last 24 hours. To those who are scared away by the fact that content disappears, Snapchat strategist Carlos Gil says, “As marketers, we operate in real time. If it’s not consumed today, it’s irrelevant.” So, what have you done for them lately?

3. Snapchat is exclusively mobile. If you’ve ever wondered why the interface feels so clunky, just know that the design is part of what has made it so successful. It was designed for mobile natives (i.e. the young’uns):

  • The first thing users see when they open the app is not a news feed, but a camera, ready to capture the next ‘snappable’ moment.
  • Discovery functionalities are minimal. Snapchat was designed for messaging, so many users have the app synced to their phone’s address book to find people to follow.
  • It’s made for vertical video.

 

Cool. So What Can My Department Do To Join The Fun?

FullSizeRender

Great question! We don’t recommend starting an account for most parts of campus. Building a followership and posting good content consistently on Snapchat is such a challenge that it’s probably not worth the time/resources. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use Snapchat for your communication efforts. Here are two things you can do if you have an event or initiative you want to cover on Snapchat:

1. Snapchat On-Demand Geofilter: Geofilters are special graphic overlays that communicate the “where and when” of a Snap in a fun way, whether users are sending it to a friend or adding it to their Story (the Snapchat equivalent of a status update). For as low as $5, businesses and individuals alike can purchase On-Demand Geofilters for their event, business, or a specific location. Brand logos and trade-marks are permitted. Get started here.

2. @DukeStudents Snapchat Takeover: We are helping the Devils’ Advocates explore the idea of takeovers for their DukeStudents Snapchat account. If you’re interested in experimenting with us, give us a holler.

What they’re looking for:

  • Visual content. Think: Video first.
  • A host – that is, somebody who’s willing to be in front of the camera. Snapchat is all about using the front-facing camera to create intimacy. Remember: Users connect with human faces, not brands.
  • A storyboard with a beginning, middle and end. Plan for a 1-3 minute long video composed from clips during the day. Our peers at Princeton University put together this great blog post on storyboarding for Snapchat.

Here are the guidelines they provide to people taking over the account.

 

*Accounts to follow if you want to see these best practices in action:

160314-How-to-Use-Snapchat-Custom-Geofilters-Inline-1

  • Gary Vaynerchuk: The author of NYT bestseller Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook has his sights set on Snapchat as 2016’s “next big thing.”
  • Yusuf Omar: Yusuf participated in the 2016 Duke Media Fellows program and is an advocate for mobile journalism.
  • DJ Khaled: Once the butt of jokes about the ‘selfie generation,’ he’s now – literally – the poster child for influencer marketing. #BlessUp
  • DukeStudents: Because duh.
  • Bonus: Check out this story on how Wake Forest U uses Snapchat during finals week to encourage students and raise awareness of on campus resources. Simply, Study Buddy Ann is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).

*Tip: Try using these links from a mobile device, after downloading the Snapchat app.