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How to Make the Most of Your Website on Social Media

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 two main types of tags you’ll need are Twitter Cards and Open Graph. 

Twitter Cards

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 have Twitter 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 the validator 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.

Facebook Guide to Sharing for Webmasters
Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

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.

How to Setup Open Graph and Twitter Cards for WordPress

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.

Student-Run Social Media: Make it Work for You

Did you know we here at Duke have a suite of channels branded Duke Students and run by a team of actual students?

Facebook: @DukeStudents
Instagram: @DukeStudents
Medium: @DukeStudents
Snapchat: @DukeStudents
Spotify: DukeStudents
Twitter: @DukeStudents
YouTube: Duke Students
Website: DukeStudents.com

Well now you do!

Here’s how we’re set up:

Student editors posing
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.

Student editors in a silly pose
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!

Social Media Do’s & Don’ts

Whether you’re looking to expand your social media efforts or simply keep pace with the competition, here are some tips, tricks and some of my personal preferences that might make the job slightly easier and your content all the more share-able.

THE THOUGHTFUL ART OF TAGGING

We’ve all seen the @ symbol. Every major social media network offers the ability to tag other users, which you should do. But there are some rules (more like guidelines).

First, a tag is not a hashtag and should not be used the same. A tag identifies the person or brand and notifies them you’ve mentioned them in a post. A hashtag identifies posts on a specific topic. (More on that later.)

Tags work very much like starting a conversation in real life. They’re the social media equivalent of a “heads up,” helping to signify to another user that you’re talking about them, alerting them to potential topics of interest, and/or initiating a chat.

Much like there is an art to conversation, so too is there an art to tagging. Tag no one and you miss opportunities for positive conversations. Tag everyone and you’ll turn them off and they’ll tune you out — Kind of like someone calling your phone repeatedly and leaving a bunch of voicemails (boo).

  • DO: Use tags on all social media platforms
  • DO: Be selective about who you’re tagging
  • DO: Limit tags to two or fewer per post and to users who would be legitimately interested in your content
  • DO: Incorporate tags into the general flow of your writing
  • DON’T: Tag anyone & everyone who just might be interested in your content
  • DON’T: Tag yourself
  • DON’T: List a bunch of tags at the end of your post

HASHTAGS ARE NOT #MEANT #TO #BE #USED #LIKE #THIS

Hashtags are a great way to join a conversation and/or categorize your post for others to find with ease. However, excessive hashtag use is one of the most irritating social media habits to avoid (IMO). A well-used hashtag can increase engagement, but too many or inapplicable hashtags render your post illegible and gives your account an air of desperation.

This section’s title trends towards the hyperbolic, but even the below tactic is rather unadvisable:

Also keep in mind, hashtags do work differently on each platform. For your convenience, the one and only Sonja put together this most practical of presentations. And if you’re in the market for Duke specific hashtags -> Well we have a list for that.

  • DO: Use hashtags appropriate to your content
  • DO: Use hashtags differently depending on the platform
  • DO: Check hashtags to make sure they don’t have unintended or alternate meanings
  • DON’T: Use inapplicable hashtags just to join trending topics
  • DON’T: Over hashtag — For maximum engagement, you pretty much get 1 or 2 per post and that’s it (except on Instagram)

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

Every day millions of people upload millions of social media images. It’s true that photos usually garner greater engagement, but those that inspire actual engagement rather than a cursory glance are few and far between. Why? Too many images are low-quality, unappealing, incorrectly sized or just flat out boring.

The images you share with a post are every bit a part of the story you’re telling as the text. Actually images are more emotionally resonate, so your image will generally supersede the accompanying text as the main takeaway for your audience. So a pixelated photo or an image without a focal point is like showing up to a cocktail party in your worn-out pajamas.

  • DO: Use the right size image for the right platform – Sprout’s handy list is a good place to start
  • DO: Improve your visual literacy (Words have meanings — So do images)
  • DO: Use visuals with consistent color and design aesthetic (if possible)
  • DO: Plan your social content with visual imagery in mind
  • DON’T: Use headshots alone on social platforms — There’s almost always a better way
  • DON’T: Use graphics on your Instagram feed — Trust us
  • DON’T: Post blurry or pixelated pictures

A CHAIN IS ONLY AS STRONG AS ITS WEAKEST LINK

This section begins with one overarching message: People are less likely to click on a link if they don’t trust where it takes them.

There is a lot of bad content on social media, so people tend to be a tad skeptical. This means we have to work even harder to gain users’ trust, most of the time before they ever click on that link we’re sharing.

When it comes to links, looks aren’t everything but they certainly make a difference. The main platforms we use to share links — Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn — use social cards, which allow the content creator to choose the image, title and description that displays on social media platforms when someone shares the content.

Without social cards on your website, we have to manually upload (and alt text to) an image every time we (and anyone else for that matter) share your link. The alternative is to live with whatever image the platform pulls in from your website, which is more-times-than-not most unflattering. Facebook and LinkedIn allow for some customization when posting natively. Twitter does not.

If your website does not have social cards (especially Twitter Cards), please talk to your web developer to have them added. If you do have social cards, please be cognizant of what images are being pulled in. Decapitated headshots and too small images don’t do anyone any favors and diminish the chance a reader might actually click your link (unless you’re indeed trying to scare them away).

  • DO: Have your web developer add social cards to your website
  • DO: Pay attention to what images the cards pull in on different platforms
  • DO: If your website uses vertical images, plan to have horizontal options for social
  • DON’T: Share sketchy links to sources that might not be trustworthy
  • DON’T: Bury your link in a bunch of tags and/or hashtags like it’s a word search puzzle

THE END IS NEAR

Since we’ve given you examples of what not to do, here’s a Tweet that gets all four things right to end today’s conversation:

Well that’s all the advice I have for this blog post outing. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and be sure to check out our previous entries as well as be on the lookout for upcoming posts on all manner of topics related to the wide world of social media. Until then 👋

Social Media Accessibility at Duke

You may have heard communicators starting to talk about accessibility at Duke, and while a lot of it has to do with websites and videos, some has to do with social media as well.

Video Captioning

Let’s start with videos since we use video so often on social media. While not all videos require captioning at Duke, in order for us to share videos on our main Duke channels, including social media, videos do need to be captioned.

Screen capture of video with captions featuring President Price

The easiest way to caption your videos is in YouTube. YouTube allows you to upload a text file or transcribe your file in real-time, and then it auto-times the captions for you and makes an .srt file. You can use that same .srt file on pretty much every platform that allows captioning, including Facebook and Twitter (although on Twitter, you need to use Media Studio).

If your video is longer than a few minutes, you can use an OIT-vetted captioning service to outsource the captioning. For livestreaming, we’ve also typically outsourced captioning.

Image Tagging

The other main part of making social media accessible is adding alt tags to your images. Alt tags give alternate text to describe an image. If your websites are accessible, you’re using alt tags there already. Now, many social media platforms also give us the opportunity to insert alt tags for images.

On Facebook, every time you upload an image, there’s an option to edit your photo and add alt text:

Screencapture of Facebook post showing edit option on uploaded photo
Click the paintbrush to edit the photo.
Screencapture of alt text option on Facebook images
Then click the “Alt text” button to add your own alternate text to the image.

You can even go back and edit photos you’ve already posted to include alt text.

On Instagram, the idea is the same. You can edit the photo to add alt text.

Screencapture of 'Add Alt Text' option on Instagram
Click on the “Add Alt Text” option.
Screencapture of Alt Text screen on Instagram

As with Facebook, you can go back and edit images you’ve already posted to add alt text.

Twitter allows you to add alt text as well, as you are posting. You do need to turn on the option first, though.

Screencapture of 'Add description' option on Twitter
Click the “Add description” option at the bottom of an uploaded picture.
Screencapture of space to add description on Twitter images

Unfortunately, as with all Twitter posts, you cannot go back and edit them later, including going back to edit or add alt text.

Scheduling

If you’re doing a lot of social media, you’re probably scheduling your content. You can schedule natively in Facebook, including adding the alt text, but what about the other platforms?

We haven’t found a great scheduler for Instagram that includes all of Instagram’s features, like alt text and location tagging. Luckily, if you have a scheduler you like, you can continue to use it and just add the alt text after you’ve posted.

For Twitter, we’ve been told that Sprout includes accessibility options. In UComms, we’re using Buffer for Twitter scheduling, which does allow us to add alt text. Without a scheduler that allows alt tagging, Twitter is really hard to manage and make accessible. There’s no native scheduler in Twitter and no way to edit old Twitter posts.

Hacks to Make Things Easier

Not everything has to be alt tagged! If, for example, you’re posting a link on Facebook or Twitter, the “card” that comes with that link does not need an extra alt tag.

Screencapture of Twitter card example
This is a Twitter card!

If your website is set up with the proper OpenGraph tagging for Facebook and Twitter, you should be all set and not even have to worry about uploading a separate image for your tweet or post. (Your webmaster can help you with this!) If you want to see a preview of what your link or anyone else’s link will look like on Twitter, you can try the Twitter card validator.

More on Accessibility

There’s a whole website at Duke dedicated to accessibility, so I encourage you to dig into that if you have more questions about what you should be doing, what you’re required to be doing, and how to implement changes in your processes. Also, please feel free to reach out to me (Sonja Likness) about social media accessibility or Joel Crawford-Smith at Duke about your other Duke accessibility-related questions. We’d be happy to help!

And, BONUS: Joel and I recently did a Learn IT @Lunch about accessibility.

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.

What kind of content does “Big Duke” share?

If you’re in social media at Duke, “big Duke,” i.e. Duke University branded social media, is probably looking at your content and deciding what to share. For Ashley and me (the voices behind “big Duke”), your content makes our jobs fun, and a lot easier than creating all of the content ourselves!

We hope that you get some benefit when we share your content, too, in the form of an expanded audience.

But what types of content are we looking to share? I’ll give you some tips on our favorite stuff, and ways you can create shareable pieces.

Topics

Our audiences for the big Duke accounts are many and varied, but we’re generally looking for content that will speak to a wide range of people who love Duke, who live in the community or in North Carolina, or a general public who might be interested in your content based on their personal, relatable experiences.

I know that’s sort of a topical non-answer, but if you have a specific question about your subject matter, you can always feel free to get in touch!

Made-for-social video

We love video that’s meant for social media, like vertical video for Instagram Stories or horizontal videos with caption files for YouTube and Facebook. If you have the caption files already done and saved as an .srt, we love you even more!

Beautiful graphics or portraits

Anything we share, whether a web link or an Instagram post, needs to have beautiful visual assets either as the centerpiece or accompaniment. If you’re sharing a web link with us, we’d love to have an original, high-res version of your hero graphic, and extra images if you have them, too. Graphics, portraits, and beautiful photography give us the options we need to share your content on the appropriate channels.

Vertical slides

Instagram Stories and other stories-format platforms are becoming more ubiquitous in our line of work. If you have vertical assets already created, please share them with us! They make our Instagram Stories look a lot more interesting and high-quality.

We hope that gives you some ideas to get your content flowing! Feel free to contact me if you’d like to brainstorm or get more specifics!

Social Media Analytics for Beginners

If you’re a beginner in social media for higher ed, you may have gotten as far as setting up your social media accounts, but now you have to report on your success. That means… DUN DUN DUN… analytics. If you’ve never done reporting with analytics it might sound a little scary. Let’s break it down so that you know what to measure and then how to measure it.

What should you measure?

This is an important question because you can’t measure everything, and if you try, you will spend all of your time on it, and probably go a little nuts. What you measure in social media will be based on your goals for social media (which are probably also your general marketing and communications goals for your entire unit or department). Here are some common goals in higher ed:

  • Referral traffic (to a website, maybe)
  • Engagement
  • Info capture (like email addresses for a newsletter)
  • Sales funnel (or admissions funnel) — getting people to buy or do something
  • Eyeballs on stories
  • Brand and reputation management

You might have two or three of these goals, but you probably won’t have all of them. (If you have more than two or three, I’d encourage you to pick your top two or three anyway, and focus on those.)

Now that you have your goals in mind, you have a general idea of what you want to measure.

  • If your goal is referral traffic, you should measure traffic to your sites from social media.
  • If your goal is engagement, you should measure the percentage of users who interact with your social media content.
  • If your goal is info capture, you should measure how much info you can capture starting with social media CTAs. (CTA is just a fancy abbreviation for a Call To Action, like “read more,” “click here,” or “apply now.”)
  • If your goal is to get people into a sales funnel, you should measure how many sales you make (or applications are started) starting with social media CTAs.
  • If your goal is eyeballs on stories, you should measure how many clicks you get on links shared.
  • If your goal is brand and reputation management, you should measure sentiment.

How do you measure?

Depending on what you’d like to measure, a lot of it can be pulled from social media platforms themselves. There’s Twitter analytics, Facebook Insights, and YouTube analytics (which are super beefy because Google owns YouTube). Instagram has analytics, too, although you can only get them on your phone, and you’re going to want to make sure you’re a business account so that you get the most analytics possible.

You’re probably also going to want to get familiar with Google Analytics, which will give you information on where your website traffic is coming from, including referrals from social media. Google Analytics can also help you manage your sales or admissions funnel if you use their tagging system faithfully. The best news is that it’s all free, of course.

Sentiment is the hardest piece that you might have to measure. Some social media platforms will have a sentiment measurement built in, but they’re notoriously inaccurate because they’re based on keywords, and can’t accurately measure the emotion behind a tweet or a post. You can track the changes in your sentiment score over time, though, and dig deeper into any anomalies. That way, at least you have a baseline to start from.

As with all things that seem overwhelming, start small and work your way up! This week, learn how to find out how your audiences are engaging on Instagram, for example. Next week: CONQUER THE WORLD!

Livestreaming at Duke: How, When, Why

Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, you’ve probably started to pick up on the fact that livestreaming is a pretty big deal on social media these days. We do a bit of it at Duke. In this post, I’ll share with you how we do it, and the strategy that drives our livestreams.

How do I livestream? I want to, but I don’t know where to start.

You have a couple of different tech options, depending on how fancy you want to get (and how much money you want to spend).

Quick & Dirty

Get it done with just your phone and a few additional pieces of gear.

You’ll need:

  • Your phone

And maybe a few other things:

This is the cheapest, quickest way to get your livestreaming off the ground, and you can do it with as much informality as you like. The nice thing about livestreaming is that people expect it to be a little bit rough and behind-the-scenes looking.

Hangouts-Style

You can also use YouTube’s built-in livestreaming if you want to do a hangouts-style broadcast with several hosts interacting remotely. All you need is some time to set up, and for each of your hosts to have a laptop with a webcam. We do this style for admitted student chats, and we’ve written a really long and comprehensive blog post on that!

On the Cheap

At Duke, we tend to use a version of livestreaming that’s a bit of an upgrade from the quick & dirty version, but still not a full production. Try using your web browser and webcam for a Facebook livestream, or upgrade to using software like OBS (free!) or Wirecast (not free) with a webcam and mic. Add branded elements like lower thirds for more impact.

At Duke, we use a set-up that includes:

We used a set-up like this for this year’s class photo livestream:

It’s portable and fun, but still delivers fairly high quality.

Studio Produced

If we’re looking for something that looks more like a live TV show, we hire the experts. At Duke, that means Media Services. They can do a beautiful set-up with multiple cameras, great sound and additional graphics. You could get something close to this if you had a studio set-up of your own with a soundboard and a broadcast-quality camera or three.

We livestream Duke’s commencement ceremony this way.

But what things should I livestream and what should be my livestreaming goals?

Great livestreams all have a few things in common:

  • They’re interactive!
    • Things like faculty chats are great for this sort of video. Ask a question to get things started.
    • Make sure to also take time to stop and respond to comments and questions.
  • They’re at a time of day that works for people. After all, the point is to get people to tune in LIVE.
    • You might have to experiment with a few different times of day before you land on the right one.
  • They’re consistent.
    • Think of your livestream like a TV program. If people know when to tune in regularly, they will!
    • Think about a weekly show or a monthly event that you could livestream.
  • They drive toward your strategic goals.
    • Of course everything in your content plan should drive toward your strategic goals, and livestreams are no different. If your goal is to generate leads, then you need a way to capture that information. If your goal is to launch or promote a product, then make your livestreams support that.

Go out there and have fun! Livestreaming can be stressful and a lot of work, but live interaction and getting your audiences to experience things real-time with you makes it all worth it.

Takeaways for Higher Ed from VidCon 2018

VidCon is not always the type of conference you’d think of for a higher ed professional. It’s all about online video, and a lot of it is about screaming pre-teens running after their favorite YouTube stars. This year, though, my boss and I got ourselves some industry track passes and dove in. Here’s what we learned!

Sonja & Laura in the emoji photo booth at VidCon

YouTube!

You can use YouTube for more than just hosting your videos. Use all the functionality of YouTube to really take full advantage of the platform!

  • Use the community tab to interact with users: Ask questions, deploy polls, etc.
  • “Stories” tab is coming for channels with >10,000 subscribers this year!

What should your branding and subject matter be on YouTube?

  • Find and study 5 channels that you want to be like.
  • Optimize for the “suggested video” function in YouTube by changing your thumbnails to ones that match current videos, and updating old titles to match current trends.
  • Personalities do well on YouTube.
  • Check out #YouTubeTaughtMe for some really fun stories about what people have learned from YouTube.

Facebook!

Facebook has some interesting video formats to play with.

  • Facebook Watch:
    • Check out George Takei Presents. It’s growing by 20k subscribers/day!
    • Facebook Watch is better for programs rather than personalities (as opposed to YouTube, where personalities rule).
  • Facebook Live:
    • Create a consistent live video programming schedule.
    • The key for live video is interaction.
  • Facebook Stories:
    • You can save some work by importing these from Instagram Stories if you’re already doing them.

LinkedIn!

  • LinkedIn is a pretty un-crowded (is that a word?) space for video creators right now. That’s why a lot of video creators are jumping in!
  • Max length for a LinkedIn video is 10 minutes.
  • Here are some LinkedIn personalities to check out: Bill Gates, Emirates, Gary Vee

Snapchat!

  • Is Snapchat dead or dying? Maybe. In the Snapchat vs. Instagram Stories battle, it looks like Instagram Stories is winning.
  • But Snapchat is different from Instagram in that authentic content is the key. Snapchat doesn’t depend on the likes, comments or “score” of your posts. It’s all about the relationships.

Content!

We talked a lot about educational content at VidCon.

  • Answer questions people didn’t know they had.
  • Establish friendliness and familiarity. (ex. Crash Course on YouTube)
  • For teens & tweens, let them participate in some way and focus on how things affect them now.

How can you stay on top of trends?

  • Use Google Trends to monitor trending terms.
  • Track your overall channel performance year over year to account for seasonal changes, and then adjust as necessary!

Working with Students

If you were to ask me what the most rewarding part of my job is, one of my top 3 answers would easily be getting to work with students. It’s also one of the most common questions my colleagues and I are asked about our social strategy at conferences–“How do we use our students’ voices so strategically?” During my three years at Duke, I’ve been ridiculously fortunate to work with and get to know some pretty exceptional students.

Can they be a handful at times? Does it take a lot of time and effort to manage our student team? Is it an absolute NIGHTMARE wrangling student schedules to nail down a meeting time for the semester? Absolutely. But allow me to make the case for working with students–plenty of them, and often.

While working with student teams can be a bit like herding a bunch of overachieving and hilarious kittens at times, they also have some of the best ideas when it comes to content or how to reach their peers. Their opinions on how we market to prospective and current students are invaluable. Plus, they advise us on what platforms their peers are using, how to speak to them in an authentic way, and when and where to reach them. Essentially, they keep us cool and up to speed on what The Kids are doing. So working with them is a mix of:

But also,

At Duke, our @DukeStudents handles are absolutely flourishing and it is 100% due to the efforts of the students who have total ownership over each platform. They’re currently on Instagram (by far their strongest presence), Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  There are the formal Duke University institutional accounts that I manage and the more informal, student-voiced @DukeStudents channels that allow current students to interact with one another as well as prospective students. We keep these DukeStudents and Duke University branded social accounts completely separate. Our student team is composed of 8 editors–one for each platform and a managing editor who acts as team leader and analytics expert.

While we certainly give them guidelines on things to avoid and advise them in certain situations, the students have ownership of their channels and the content they post there. We’ve found that properly training and then empowering them to own their channels is a great way to foster the dedication and level of professionalism and enthusiasm needed to see their audiences grow. Ownership = Attachment = Dedication.

 

We even take this one step further when it comes time to replace our graduating seniors. — MOMENT OF SILENCE–

We task each editor with identifying stars from a larger pool of their peers in a volunteer capacity to be promoted to the paid editor positions. The team is structured with 8 paid student editors who mentor a larger pool of mostly-first-year student volunteers (usually around 20). These student volunteers help to curate and create content for the DukeStudents channels and as our platform editors graduate, they select their successors largely from this broader volunteer pool. Our editors get experience with managing and mentoring a team and our student volunteers get to feel like they are a part of a structured effort on behalf of their university with opportunities to play a significant future role in the DukeStudents social presence.

P.S. Paying them helps too. Managing an institutional social channel is a job and should be treated as such.

We also offer them other perks, like exclusivity on information that will be relevant to the broader student body. For example, one of our student editors was actually featured in our top secret project with Apple earlier this year. We tapped him because we had the working relationship from his time on the @DukeStudents team. We also let the broader team of editors know what was coming about 20 minutes before the video formally dropped. Additionally, we tap them for special projects related to recruitment and yield.  We want them to feel important and valued as a member of the communications team for their university.

We also want to help our students build up their professional skills and resumes. We get them access to our colleagues who may be experts in areas that they are interested in pursuing or who can teach them particular skills that they want to learn. We make sure to give their creativity and work a large platform. For example, this past fall one of our student interns produced a beautiful video to welcome Duke 2022 to the incoming class when decisions were announced.

 

Join the Blue, #Duke2022!!! 🔵😈🎉🎊

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on

She created, filmed, produced and edited this project from start to finish. We amplified on our channels, but she now has a solid piece of work to add to her portfolio.

Did I also mention they’re just fun to hang out with? So there’s our approach to working with students. It’s not for everyone but I highly encourage you to make the effort to find a few good ones and see what sort of magic you can make together!