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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!

5 Graphic Design Tips for Social Media (and Everything Else!)

So you want to be a graphic designer? It’s much more than just combining texts and words. It’s about using those texts, fonts and colors to design a brand.

American Apparel has their clean, Helvetica Black look. Unicef has its official, purposeful cyan. And Starbucks has their earthy tones that showcase their handicraft style. There is no way to paint a perfect painting, and likewise there is no way to craft the perfect graphic design, but every time I work with the Duke Office of News and Communications, from designing an Instagram story or an official Chinese New Year card for the university, I think about what story I want to create. What is the Duke that I want people to see?

Here are a few ways to get started:

Have a Consistent Look

There has to a be a point in our life when we all thought we were artists creating WordArt masterpieces with rainbow block font combined with circular text and wavy fonts. To create a brand, one must start with a consistent look that readers will view so that part of their brain will immediately register what they’re seeing as ‘Duke.’ This includes working with a one or two select fonts with a similar look, staying within a certain color palette, and making sure to align objects on the page. You can use Duke’s StyleGuide to get an idea of what these are for Duke.

Negative Space

Contrast is everything when it comes to making things stand out. If you have a light colored graphic or text, use a dark background and vice versa. A good way to do this is by increasing the opacity of a photo to create a lighter background or decreasing its brightness to create a darker background.

Here, I used a consistent font (official Garamond, Duke scholarly feel) and used contrast between dark navy words and opacity and brightness-adjusted background.

Typography

Be creative with your fonts and make sure they reflect the vibe you are trying to create! For originality, I like to use very distinctive fonts for big titles and more standard, easily readable fonts for subtitles and smaller text. Online free font databases include dafont.com, fontsquirrel, and urbanfonts.

Canva

This is a useful site for fledgling graphic designers. It allows you to select from a library of different templates for different needs, ranging from flyers to posters to social media posts. Everything is designed and aligned for you – but if you’re an artsy one and want to tap into your creative edge, it is easily navigable with drag-and-drop features: allowing you to customize fonts, colors and search for certain shapes and images. Free, easy and quick.

Photoshop

Here, we’re scaling it up by a little notch for the Photoshop beginner.

  • Rule of Thirds Grid

Sometimes a little cropping or moving objects around by a little goes a long way! You can easily display the rule of thirds grid on Photoshop and make sure that objects you want to highlight lay on one of the gridlines or at one of the intersections. This makes a photo’s composition more appealing to the eye.

Go to the crop tool and a toolbar will appear where you can select ‘Rule of thirds’

Design: Chinese New Year card to Duke’s Chinese audience

Here, you can see that I aligned the dog’s face, “Duke University” as well as “Dog” onto the gridlines.

  • Magnetic lasso tool

Want to cut something out from a picture? Most people use the lasso tool. Sadly, our hands can be shaky and most of us simply don’t have the patience to cut with surgical precision. The Magnetic Lasso tool is the solution to all your problems, especially when you have a bold contrast and well-defined edges. Click and hold your mouse over the Lasso tool until a fly-out menu appears, and select the last one with a tiny magnet on its icon. Click once on the edge of the object and just run your mouse along the edges of the object you want to select (like when you are using scissors to cut something out). This is how I cut out the turkey and gave it to the Blue Devil for Thanksgiving!

  • Play with opacity

A layer with 1% opacity is close to transparent, while a layer with 100% opacity is opaque. Whether you are brushing something over with the paintbrush or inserting another layer, you can adjust the opacity to make sure things blend in more naturally or so that certain objects do not stand out as much.

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!

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.

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!

Meaningful content really makes the difference when promoting stories through Facebook Ads

Although soccer is just starting to grab people’s attention in the United States, in other regions of the world it’s kind of a big deal—especially in Europe and Latin America. As a way to engage students interested in this sport with international history, languages and politics, Professor Laurent Dubois, from the Romance Studies department, teaches a class at Duke in which he analyzes the political, social and cultural impact of soccer around the world.

Besides touching an unusual subject, this class has another particularity: it is taught in four different languages—English, Spanish, Italian and French. Given the class’ global characteristics, our team produced a story both in English and Spanish touching on its different and unique aspects. Our goal was to highlight Duke’s innovative approach to teaching around a topic that’s interesting and newsworthy, with the World Cup starting in June.

This is when the social media component came to the table. How were we going to promote this content to our Spanish-speaking audiences? We had previously used Facebook ads to target stories in certain countries in Latin America, and we decided that this would be an opportunity to test this tool again with this story. For a week in April we ran an ad promoting the Spanish-language story about Duke’s soccer politics course. Our goal? Reach new Spanish-speaking audiences not following Duke on Facebook.

The results of the campaign were simply mind-blowing. Not only did the story become the highest performing story on Duke Today for the month of April, but we also gained 185 new Duke University Facebook page likes. The story generated 378 reactions (most of them overwhelmingly positive), eight comments and 140 shares.

We also got to learn a little bit more about our audiences. For example, the country in which this story generated the most engagement was Peru. Males between 18-65+ years old were the most engaged audience, and the majority of them came to our story through the Facebook ad, which was mostly viewed via mobile devices.

This experiment allowed us to test how our international audiences react to content tailored specifically to them. We are excited to keep experimenting with new forms of media to reach people outside of the United States with meaningful messages that resonate with their interests.

How Duke Covers Commencement

One of the most common questions the social media team gets each year as we head into commencement is “What is your shot list and how will you cover the event?” To many of our colleagues’ frustration, our answer is almost always, “We will see what we get on the day of.” Basically, at this point our plan about consists of a whole lot of this:

And a little bit of this:

 

Now, let me explain. This is not simply due to a lack of planning or to purposefully drive our commencement committee insane with unknowns. It’s because, truly, coverage of a live event is all about what I see once I get there. Sure, we can make educated guesses about what sort of content we will be looking for at the ceremony (students in robes, a timelapse of some sort, cute parents being excited), but the best part about these things are the unexpected content opportunities.

For example, these fashionable dudes simply could NOT be anticipated. I just happened to notice them in the procession and was lucky to grab a moment of video footage for our Instagram stories.

Another example is the content we posted that morning prior to the ceremony. I had no idea that I would be inspired to get a lovely campus shot of the quiet at 7:30 am before our ceremony. It just sort of happened as I was making my way through campus to the stadium.

Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t have some sort of idea about content before going into an event. We knew we would have student shots, behind-the-scenes coverage of Wallace Wade Stadium before the ceremony began, etc. We knew our hashtags and that we’d want coverage of Tim Cook as this year’s commencement speaker. Sonja planned for and manned the live stream on our Facebook channel while I covered real-time content on the field on Instagram stories and Snapchat. But the real fun begins once the students arrive and you see the wacky fashion choices, hat decor, excited parents, etc. None of that content can be planned for.

This year, we also held off on posting photo content to our Instagram feed until post-ceremony, which gave us enough time to get shots from our amazing photo team AND see what the graduates and other schools/units around campus had shared from the event. We really had our pick of content using this method instead of rushing to get something up in real-time. This is just another great bonus of the Stories feature on the app! We were active on Instagram before the ceremony even started, but with stories, we were able to share content without rushing to post something we didn’t absolutely love right away. This really gave us a greater variety of content to share in the afternoon and in the following couple of days.

Forever, forever and #ForeverDuke! 😈🎓

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on


So there you have it! It’s never an exact science, but our biggest bit of advice is to keep your eyes peeled for a variety of shots and behind-the-scenes content that can only be captured while the event is happening.

Student Live-Chats: An Admissions Yield Tool

All of you in higher ed world are probably involved in the same thing that we are at Duke in the month of April: Admissions yield! We admit our students at the beginning of April, and they typically have until May 1 to decide which of their college admissions offers to accept. We, of course, want them all to pick Duke!

One way that we try to help our admitted students to figure out if Duke is the right fit for them is by giving them access to current Duke students. Our Duke Students channels on Instagram, Snapchat (@DukeStudents), Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are great ways to reach them, but we also want them to have some real “face time” with our current students. Enter our student live-chats.

The Set-Up

  1. Choose a time. We usually aim for a time when our east and west coast students can join, and also a time that works for high school and college students. (Basically, that means nothing before noon.)
  2. Set up your tech details. We use YouTube Live (Google Hangouts On Air), but you could do this with any number of platforms. YouTube Live works well for us because it’s easy to have our students “call in” from anywhere they happen to be.
  3. Work with your admissions team to let your admitted students know. We send an invitation to the live chat to each admitted student so that they can watch at the appointed time and ask their questions. Send your admitted students the link to the YouTube video, not the link to join the Google Hangouts On Air. They’ll be able to watch the video on YouTube and ask questions in the chat box, but they won’t show up on the video screen with your student hosts.
  4. Coordinate your student hosts. Make sure they know what time you’re starting, and send lots of reminders! Ask them to be in a quiet place with good wifi and headphones with a microphone. (Their Apple earbuds will work.) Let them know where you’ll be sharing the link for them to join the chat on the big day and ask them to join the chat a few minutes early to trouble-shoot any tech issues. (Trouble-shooting for us usually involves having them try a different browser or re-start their computer if something isn’t working. Super high-tech, I know.)

Getting Ready on the Big Day

  1. Sign in to YouTube and get your event going. It won’t broadcast immediately, so you have time to do your set-up before you hit go.
  2. Invite your student hosts to the chat using the link that your Google Hangouts On Air will provide. (We’ve tried it lots of other ways, but texting the link to the student hosts on the day-of is the most reliable method for us.)

    Send this link to your student hosts, not to your admitted students. Your admitted students should get the YouTube link where they can watch and participate by asking questions in the chat box.

  3. Get all your student hosts signed in.
  4. Test their sound and lay down your ground rules. (We don’t have many besides our long-standing “grandma rule:” Don’t say it if it would offend your grandma.) One of our ground rules is also that the student hosts mute themselves when they’re not speaking. This keeps the video from automatically flipping to them if a noise happens in the background or they sneeze or something.

During the Chat

  1. Once you start broadcasting, turn off your own video and sound so that it’s just your student hosts who are showing up on the screen. You may also want to change your cameraman settings so that you’re only broadcasting the large video that you see to your audience, and hiding the other thumbnail video feeds. (If your student hosts are goofing around when they’re not the ones talking, this keeps them off the screen!)
  2. I keep open my Google Hangouts On Air window and also open the YouTube window with the chat in it. This is where your admitted students will be asking questions. If you don’t have a question right away, don’t panic! It’s best to have a few frequently asked questions to start with, just in case the chat starts slow.
  3. As the questions come in, I paste them into the Google Hangouts On Air chat for the student hosts. This keeps the student hosts from having to flip back and forth to the YouTube window, and since I’m not talking on the chat, I can field questions and put them in a good order for them to answer. I’m basically the silent question moderator.
  4. Set an end time or stop when the questions stop. We can usually go for a solid hour before the student hosts get tired, so we say we’ll go for an hour unless we run out of questions. We often have more questions than we can answer in an hour!

Extra Tips

  1. Vet your student hosts before-hand. I pick students I already know are enthusiastic, good on camera, friendly and reliable.
  2. Practice! Run a test YouTube Live if you haven’t done it before, preferably on your personal channel or on a test channel somewhere.
  3. Don’t panic. It’s live and sometimes stuff happens live. Someone’s wifi will cut out or there will be some weird background noise or a host of other weird issues. Roll with it. Your audience knows it’s live and they’ll understand some hiccups.
  4. Re-use it when you’re done! We caption our student chats and re-share them for admitted students who may have missed out on the live chat. In fact, most of our views come from people re-watching the chats on YouTube.
  5. Have fun! It’s a cool, great way to connect with your admitted students and share your enthusiasm with them.

Our latest student chat is below, and if you’d like to see one live, our next one will be April 18 at 8 pm EST.

Channel Strategy at Duke: Audiences, Platforms and How We Decide What to Post Where

When we started really thinking about how we wanted to share our content at Duke, we realized we needed to think about both audience and platform. As it turns out, it was harder than we thought to answer the questions, “Who is our audience?” and, “What are our platforms?”

We started with the question of audience. It’s a question that bears a little more thought than it would if we were selling widgets, since we’re trying to reach a lot of different audiences at once and there’s not one single, measurable goal we’re shooting for.

We came up with something that looked like this:chart of all Duke audiences

If that’s not enough to make your head spin, then we had to think about all of the platforms that we have available for our use, and which audiences use which platforms. Can we reach all of our students with a newsletter? Are a large percentage of our alumni fans on our Facebook page? What about prospective students in China, where many of our social channels are not accessible?

We ended up with a really, really complicated grid. Don’t look at this for too long. Your brain will melt.

Ok, so the chart above isn’t super helpful. When I shared it with my colleagues, most of them kind of just got glassy-eyed and uninterested. I get it. It’s too much.

But, what this chart allowed me to do was come up with a channel strategy: a way to say what each Duke channel can be used for, based on where our audiences interact.

Each slide looks something like this:

It’s a living document that everyone on the social media team can reference, and it changes as our policies change, which means we can pivot if Facebook changes their algorithm (again) or if Instagram adds a shiny new feature.

Your mileage will vary, of course. Each institution will have unique audiences and demographics for each platform.

We’ve found, though, that as a social media and content team at Duke, having everything spelled out like this means we can strategize together, create with the same goal in mind, and fill in for each other a lot easier than we could before.

Want to hear more about this? I’ll be speaking on this topic at the Social Fresh conference in December. Other speakers include folks from IBM, Starbucks and Facebook. Hope you’ll join me there to hear about lots of actionable and practical tips, tricks and case studies.