Accounts of colleagues and frequent collaborators or research groups
Academic and lay publications covering your field
Professional organizations related to your field
Plan to post multiple times a week. Twitter is such a fast-moving medium that it can accommodate multiple posts a day – but that’s not necessary.
Great, sharable content includes publications, faculty and student awards, reports/images from the field, grant or funding opportunities, and more.
Consider not only sharing news from your department or unit, but also including a post every week or so that gives credit to others – something you’re reading and that influenced your thinking or really knocked you out.
Including graphics, images or Twitter cards greatly increases the engagement with your posts.
To ensure you can get picked up by other accounts – and because it’s the right thing to do – make sure to add “alt text” to images so that they’re accessible to people using screen readers.
For Trinity social media: Get the Twitter handle and icon added to the footer of your website by emailing trinitywebsupport@duke.edu. They can also help you integrate a scrolling feed in your homepage.
It’s only 280 characters and an image or three. How hard can it be? A well-crafted tweet takes time and thoughtfulness, as all social media-savvy communicators know. For those just getting started – or who simply need a refresher or reference list! – here are some best practices to consider before you press “Tweet.”
Have you checked your grammar and spelling? Is the copy clear and easy to read?
Does the tweet state what you want people to do and give them a way to do that? (Ex: A link to read more, a link to register)
How does what you’re sharing connect to your department or unit? If you don’t tell people, they won’t know! (Ex: “our faculty member” or “English student Kathryn Kennedy” or “program alum Quantá Holden” or “our course on…” or “an event/guest speaker we are hosting”)
Can any person you’re tweeting about be tagged? And if so, are they active? (Note: I generally consider activity within the last six months, and make sure there’s nothing that could be reputationally damaging in what they regularly share.)
Are there other departments, Duke entities or collaborators (universities, colleagues, journals, funding agencies) who should be tagged?
Have you included alt text for the image to serve users with screen readers?
We’ve found that a list like this can also be helpful in illustrating to non-communicators (i.e. your academic bosses and partners) all the work that goes into what may appear to be a simple type-and-post process. Happy tweeting!
Social media analytics is the process of tracking, collecting, and analyzing data from social networks. In University Communications, we use analytics to both understand social media performance and to inform future decisions about how we present and share content on our platforms.
Today, we’re going to talk about how we collect this valuable information, specifically on Twitter.
Twitter analytics shows you how your audience is responding to your content, what’s working, and what’s not. You can use data-driven insights to optimize your future content and get better results whether that’s more engagement, more website traffic, or more overall impressions.
When you first log in, you’ll see the account home page, which is basically a monthly Twitter report card. This page spotlights top-performing tweets and introduces you to influencers in your network:
Twitter Activity Dashboard
Although the Twitter analytics home page provides a nice overview, the best information (IMO) is on the Tweet Activity Dashboard. By clicking the “Tweet” tab, you’ll be able to track the number of impressions, engagements, and engagement rate for each and every Tweet you send:
For a more granular view of the volume of each type of engagement, you can click on the specific Tweet:
This allows you to suss out the specific types of engagements your Tweet received. For example, we know that a Tweet with a social media card will on average receive more link clicks than a Tweet with a photo and the link in the Twitter caption.
But the most useful feature (again IMO) is the ability to adjust the date range and export your data as a CSV file:
This feature allows you to sort through the exported data using Excel in ways that are impossible within the platform itself.
Now what?
There are several data columns in the export, so you can develop a customized analysis on whatever metric makes the most sense for your account strategy. Here are a couple common terms and definitions to get you started:
Impressions A total tally of all the times a Tweet has been seen.
Reach The number of users who saw an impression of your Tweet in their timeline. Twitter does not provide this metric in their analytics dashboard, so generally you would need a third-party tool to determine your reach.
Engagement A Twitter user’s interaction with a Tweet, including Retweets, replies, likes, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, or Tweet expansion.
Engagement Rate This varies slightly by platform, but for Twitter engagement rate is calculated by the number of engagements divided by impressions.
Clicks There are several kinds of Twitter “clicks” available in the downloaded analytics — user profile clicks, url clicks, hashtag clicks, etc. For our purposes, we track url clicks to determine the amount of traffic we’re driving to Duke websites.
We use Excel to aggregate our data so we can find common trends among our top Tweets, determine particular days/times that work best with our audience, and compare our performance year-over-year.
Duke University Social Media Twitter Analytics Summary Spreadsheet@DukeU Twitter Analytics Over TimeApril 2021 Analytics Monthly Snapshot
By understanding which content items get the most engagement, you can start seeing trends over time — and then applying those insights to future tweets — you’ll be able to better connect with your audience.
To get the most out of your social media efforts, you’ll want to make sure that your website links show up properly. So today, we’re going to talk about the importance of ensuring your website looks great on social media and provide the tools that’ll help enhance your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
You’re likely already aware that each page of your website should have a title tag and meta description for SEO reasons. But did you also realize you can specifically customize how your website content displays on social media platforms? The customizations are called social media cards and they make your content more engaging by adding images and summaries when you (or anyone else for that matter) share your links on social media.
Similar to the meta tags that tell programmatic robots (like Google) about the pages on your site, social media bots scan the page associated with your link to determine what info should be displayed with it in a user’s newsfeed. If the bots can’t find anything, they take their best guess. The results can vary from boring to comical. But by enabling social media cards on your website, you can control these meta tags so social media platforms accurately determine the title, description, and image that gets displayed.
The difference between a bare hyperlink and an engaging Tweet is a small bit of code on your link’s website.
In order for these lovely link previews to display on Twitter, your website must haveTwitter Cards enabled. Adding a few lines of markup on your website means links to your content will have a “Card” with photo, title, and description to help drive readers to your content.
There are technically four different types of Twitter cards, but the one we find most useful is “Summary Card with Large Image.”
Once the correct meta tags are added to your webpage (either by you or your website administrator), you can run the URL through thevalidator tool to test how the link will look on Twitter. This tool also works for any website if you’d like to see what a link would look like before Tweeting. This is helpful since sometimes websites use different images in their meta tags than appear on the site itself.
A few notes:
The most commonly recommended image size for social media cards is 1200×628 since this size fits on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For Twitter, you’ll want your image to be at least 300×157 and no bigger than 4096×4096.
Often, Twitter Cards are set to pull the first image on a page as a default. Be careful with this since Twitter will crop the image to make it fit the card. You might end up with a pixelated version or a vertical headshot where only the person’s nose is visible.
If you update the tags for your page (say you found a typo in your title or need to switch out the image), you’ll want to use the Twitter Card validator to force Twitter to do a fresh scrape of your page’s URL. This will cause Twitter to pull the new meta tag, ensuring that the most recent, accurate information is shared. Otherwise, Twitter might pull from an outdated cache instead.
Open Graph
Facebook and LinkedIn both generate link previews based on Open Graph meta tags. Like Twitter, if these Open Graph tags are missing or incomplete, the link preview will also be incomplete.
The Facebook Debugger is a great tool to see how a Facebook link will look before you post it. It’ll let you see all the information that the Facebook Crawler is pulling. Like Twitter, if you updated the image or preview text and it’s not displaying, click “Scrape Again” once or twice to force Facebook to get the updated information.
Recommendations from Facebook:
200×200 pixels is the minimum allowed image dimensions.
The image file size cannot exceed 8 MB.
If your image is smaller than 600×315 pixels, it’ll still display but the size will be much smaller.
When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook Crawler scrapes and caches the meta data from the URL. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered, which means the first person who shares your link won’t see a rendered image. You can pre-cache your images and avoid this by running the URL through the Debugger.
If you update the image, the original share will continue to show unless you refresh it in the post.
Since LinkedIn also used Open Graph tags, it functions much like Facebook. The LinkedIn Post Inspector works just like the Facebook Debugger. Paste your URL and select “Inspect” to see what your link will look like on LinkedIn.
So if your site doesn’t currently have social media cards, we’d highly recommend having them added.
If various reasons prevent the addition of social media cards to your website, you can still share your content on social media. It’s just a little bit harder.
Our recommendation is to share your text with the link and applicable image. Make sure to use the correct image size for the social media platform. Also, to meet accessibility standards, you’ll need to add alt text to the image. This can be done natively in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but only a few schedulers (Hootsuite, Sprout, etc.) have this feature. And lastly, we do have a Duke-branded link shortener available through Shib login.
So in summary, it’s key to properly manage your website content and how it displays on social media platforms rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn determine how it’s displayed for you. By optimizing Twitter Cards and Open Graph and validating the accuracy of your website content in how it’s displayed, you can curate your content specifically for each audience you have on different social channels.
Of all the social media platforms we’re going to discuss, Twitter is the medium most built for efficiency and speed. This is due to several mechanics.
First, Twitter limits its users to 280-character posts. Often seen as a hindrance, this is one of my favorite aspects. Twitter is the social media embodiment of William Strunk’s “Omit needless words” and actually forces you to make strategic edits to help capture attention in a concise manner. When I’m converting our website content to social media posts, I almost always start with Twitter because tweeting makes me get to the point and is often the best way to discover the “heart” of a story.
In turn, these bite-sized nuggets of information called Tweets make it possible for users to skim a lot of information really fast. Twitter’s feed is ordered, for the most part, chronologically (where Facebook and Instagram are decidedly not) which guarantees fast distribution (although not necessarily quality). The newest stuff is generally on top, making Twitter the place for what’s happening right now. Couple this with hashtags and trending topics and it’s not surprising Twitter is the preferred platform for breaking news.
And once that news is out there we arrive at the key player in the Twitter machine: the retweet button. At the heart of all social media platforms is the ability to share, and Twitter’s retweet mechanic is by far the most efficient example on the World Wide Web today.
Before 2009, Twitter users had to manually retweet each other by copying text, pasting it into a new window and physically typing RT before the OP’s handle all before hitting “send.” Twitter decided to build this behavior into its product — a standard practice in tech — and boy did they. Turns out, copying and pasting made people look more closely at what they shared and think about it just a smidge longer. But the retweet button has eliminated that friction and thus exacerbated outrage-sparked sharing and the wanton spread of misinformation.
[Side note: Facebook took notice and, due to their lack of viralability in the 2012 election, decided to add their version of a RT: the share button. Let’s put a pin in that and come back to it.]
So what does this mean for communicators? First, anyone using Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about their use of language due to the character limit. This functionality has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication. Also, please be advised that navigating the brevity of Twitter lingo does take practice in the actual medium. Re-using website text just isn’t going to cut it.
Second, Twitter moves quickly and thus timing influences your success on the platform almost as much as the content itself. When faced with a breaking news type story, you have two choices: Break the news yourself or have Twitter break the news for you. (There are definite pros and cons to both strategies, but for this blog we’re assuming you want to be in control of your own story.)
And lastly, because Twitter is so fast and content is so easily shareable the platform can be responsible for fueling the momentum of false news. MIT researchers found that false news on Twitter spread faster, deeper and more widely than true news. Unfortunately, it’s not just influencers and Russian bots to blame; it’s ordinary Twitter users, with modest followings, who have a bias for the “sensational, unverified, emotional and false” … amplified by the millions. For communicators, this means keeping a vigilant eye out and constantly combatting the untrue.
Well, that’s all for now. Next up, Facebook. Until then 👋
Fifty-six years ago, scholar Marshall McLuhan published “Understanding Media,” and 14 years ago I was assigned to read it as part of an undergraduate elective course, “Media, Culture and Society.” Clocking in at over 500 pages, McLuhan’s seminal work is a bit of a doorstop, but the text’s best-known phrase — “The medium is the message” — is one I haven’t forgotten. Even though McLuhan’s theory predates the digital age, his work still provides perspective on new communication platforms such as social media.
What McLuhan meant by this expression was that the actual content (i.e. this blog post) is beholden to the medium through which it’s being delivered (i.e. the computer or smartphone on which you’re currently reading). That is, the technology delivering the message (i.e. your printing presses, TVS, radios, websites, so forth and so on) inherently change how we communicate and, in so doing, alter or even supersede the message.
One of the most famous historical examples is the 1960 Richard Nixon/John F. Kennedy debate. TV audiences thought the good-looking JFK emerged victorious, while radio listeners believed Nixon to be the victor. (Some even go so far as to state that Kennedy would never have been president without the medium of television.) Same content, but what people thought had happened was very different depending on the medium they were using.
A more recent example is the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical CATS, whose stage version featuring elaborate costumes and much-lauded choreography appealed to millions for years, while its CGI-laden cinematic counterpart, well, didn’t.
Back to the matter at hand, all this is to say that the way your audience interprets, understands and engages with your content is influenced heavily by the platform you’re using and how you’re using it. From Facebook’s live video to Instagram’s filters to Twitter’s character limit, it’s important to look at each platform as a unique opportunity when crafting a story and to use each platform’s unique parameters to help shape your message. The rest of this blog series will examine how the technology behind each social media platform influences the way its users interpret its messages.
So what does this mean for communicators? First, anyone using Twitter has to adjust to the way they think about their use of language due to the character limit. This functionality has a direct impact on vocabulary, grammar and the complexity of the communication. Also, please be advised that navigating the brevity of Twitter lingo does take practice in the actual medium. Re-using website text just isn’t going to cut it.
Last year’s team of editors (I don’t have a group pic yet this year because several of our editors are studying abroad!)
We have approximately one student editor per @DukeStudents channel. I say approximately because we have a couple of people who run multiple channels, and our Instagram channel has two editors. (It works better that way for content flow.) One of these editors is our editor-in-chief, who runs strategy, analytics, and the process of keeping everyone on track. We’ve found it works a lot better when we let them be in charge of each other. I’m basically just there in case they get stuck on something.
These editors are paid! We meet in person (or via Google Hangouts for the study abroad students) once every two weeks, but the rest of their work is done off-site whenever they have time. We keep things organized on a team Slack. We try really hard not to over-schedule them. They do a lot remotely and they work different hours than I do, so it works better for everyone this way.
You might be surprised to know that the student editors have full control over their respective accounts. That means that they don’t have to submit drafts to anyone for review, and they are allowed to choose and curate what they want to post! (More on how we make that work later.)
We also have a team of content contributors. They are mostly underclassmen and are unpaid. There are about 40 of them! We meet with them once a month and keep in touch online via GroupMe. They’re each assigned one of the paid editors as their mentor for a set period of time, and then they rotate to a different editor. This gives them exposure to a lot of different social media channels. Their job is to contribute content to the editors for each of the different channels. Eventually, we hire our student editors from this group, so being a content contributor is almost part of the interview process to be a student editor.
Here are the rules:
People usually gasp and clutch their pearls when I tell them the students don’t have to submit drafts to me before they post, but we do have a pretty solid set of time-tested rules that all of the editors know and follow. I do read their posts once they go up, and on the rare occasion I have to ask them to take something down, but they’re actually usually even more careful than I would be with the rules I’ve given them.
The rules go thusly:
The “Grandma Rule:” If your grandma wouldn’t want to see it, don’t post it.
No references to alcohol, parties, drugs (and no red Solo cups, no matter what’s in them)
Nothing dangerous
No content promoting Greek or SLG organizations (This is because we don’t want to accidentally play favorites, so it’s just easier to not promote any of them.)
No profanity, including phrases like “AF,” or hashtags that contain profanity (like #GTHC and #DDMF)
Do not insult other schools, even in reference to sports
Follow NCAA athlete recruitment rules
Do not answer admissions questions. Always redirect to Admissions!
These rules really take care of most of the problems we might have with what to post and what not to post. It really helps to begin a group like this with the rules in mind so that you can be clear about expectations. We’ve found that once the expectations are established, the more freedom we can give them, the better. More freedom equals more creativity!
It’s also helpful to remember that they are students, and students are human, and humans mess up sometimes. They’re going to mess up. (To be fair, so are you.) So with that in mind, make sure that you have a plan in place for when they mess up or need help and a way they can contact you anytime.
Hiring:
I mentioned above that we hire to our paid student editors team from the pool of content creators. This gives us at least an academic year to make a determination about whether the student is enthusiastic about @DukeStudents or not, and we’re hiring for enthusiasm, not necessarily skill. You can teach skills. (Doing social media isn’t brain surgery, guys– hate to break it to you.) You cannot teach enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm!
Other ways students can help you:
If you don’t want to set up social media that your students can run on their own, there are lots of other ways to use the talent of your students:
Use them as a focus group! They know really cool stuff. Ask them about new social media channels and how they use social media.
Have them collect content for you! Most of them already know how to shoot great video on their phones and have an eye for what will work in an Instagram feed.
Occasionally make them do boring stuff. No one likes spreadsheets, but let’s be real. You’re the grown-up here and it won’t kill them to copy-paste for a couple of hours.
In conclusion, students are awesome!
Get yourself a team of them and see how much more fun they make your job!
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 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 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
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
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:
We love seeing how the different schools of @DukeU come together to provide such a rich experience for our business school students and others—like this new program in #HealthCareInnovation
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 👋
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.
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:
Click the paintbrush to edit the photo.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.
Click on the “Add Alt Text” option.
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.
Click the “Add description” option at the bottom of an uploaded picture.
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.
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!
As we all know, social media doesn’t take days off. So
when a number
of professional opportunities recently left our team understaffed for a
month, I decided to cover day-to-day management of our social content and
engagement.
Some people laughed when I told them. Others gasped. And
they all asked – how I would do this in addition to my own full-time job?
I’ll admit I was concerned. Although I had been part of
the social media team since 2016, I had only occasionally actually pushed the
buttons to control our accounts, and certainly not for an extended period of
time.
But as is common with professional
“opportunities,” this was a valuable learning experience for me, and
a chance to realize just how many life lessons also apply to running social
media, for example:
Mistakes are inevitable.
Own them, learn from them and move on.
“It’s a rite of passage,” my colleague said when I texted
her in a panic one evening, after a Twitter follower pointed out that I had
linked to the wrong story from a tweet. The follower’s #loveduke response to my
correction was a welcome affirmation of the community we engage with on our
social channels. I made other mistakes after that, but never again failed to
double check my links.
Don’t be afraid to
ask for help.
We generally post to our Instagram feed and story once a
day during the week, and I was fortunate that colleagues from our digital team
– skilled photographers, videographers and designers – were happy to plan and
create our content for the month. They recommended photos for the feed and
pulled together slides for our daily stories for me to post.
When I realized my Insta caption skills weren’t really going to cut it, and that I risked spending many long hours agonizing over captions, our student social media team jumped in and suggested captions that resonated with our followers. (Pro tip: this caption business is way harder than it looks.)
Quality output
requires real investment.
We can – and should – find ways to be efficient in our
work, but there are no shortcuts to quality.
Last year we adjusted our strategy for the @DukeU Twitter
feed, vastly reducing our retweets of other Duke accounts and increasing the
volume of original tweets. While that’s helping us support important
institutional goals, it has also added a solid two hours to our daily workload.
Managing all
of our channels, monitoring and responding to hundreds of mentions and
messages a day, and trying to get my other work done meant that I had to reduce
the volume of our tweets in order to get it all done. As a result, our posting
volume and engagement measures were significantly down for the month I was
trying to do it all.
We have a small but mighty social media team, and although
it was a good test to see what we could get done with fewer human resources, it
was also a clear demonstration of the resources our team needs to deliver the
best results for the university.
We’re back to full staff now, and I’m happy to have real
pros managing our channels again. I’m also grateful I had this opportunity and
glad I took the leap to do it, even if my Instagram captions still need some
help.
