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Social Media Efficiency

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

Use a social dashboard.

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

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

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

Get an editorial calendar.

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

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

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

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

Get quicker about image sizing.

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

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

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

Use tools to make your life easier!

Here are some of my favorites:

Photography:

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

Video:

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

Analytics:

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

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

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

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!

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 Dec 14, 2017 at 4:01pm PST

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!

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 May 13, 2018 at 10:19am PDT

Big thanks to @dukealumni Tim Cook, MBA ‘88 for joining us at today’s ceremony. #ForeverDuke #duke2018 //Photos courtesy of Apple.

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on May 13, 2018 at 12:33pm PDT

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.

How Duke Welcomed the Class of 2022

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges

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

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

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

Welcome, class of 2022 – see you soon.

Using Canva Animator to Make Even More Awesome Content

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

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

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

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

This will open the Animator tool:

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

Four @DukeAlumni dropped some powerful insights at the Women in Energy event we sponsored last month w/ @Duke_EDGE. #DukeWomen #WomensWeekend #ForeverDuke #GoDuke #energycareers

cc: @DukeU @DukeEnvironment @DukeEngineering @COEnergyOffice @DukeEnergy @EQresearchEQ @RTI_Intl pic.twitter.com/bvVx3ACExt

— DukeUEnergy (@DukeUEnergy) March 14, 2018

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

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

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

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

3 Things We’re Doing Wrong in Higher Ed Social Media

1. Calling Snapchat “dead.”

Yeah, the redesign makes your life harder. Are you going to friend all of your students so that your story shows up in their friend feed, or are you going to be content with showing up in the “Discover” tab? You decide, but know that incoming students aren’t giving up Snapchat anytime soon. We’re just going to have to figure out a way to engage. And speaking of engagement…

2. Failing to engage.

We’re really used to broadcasting. We broadcast all the time. We tweet and share links to our sites. We tell people what we want them to know. Increasingly, though, our incoming students and our other community members are looking for engagement. So, yeah, we’re going to have to do some one-on-one stuff, which takes some man/woman-power. And looking ahead, we’re going to have to engage both in the messaging apps we already use (have you checked your Facebook Page inbox recently?) and in the apps we’re going to have to learn to use, like WeChat and WhatsApp.

3. Using YouTube as a video bucket.

Your YouTube channel isn’t just a place where you can chuck all your video content so that you can embed it elsewhere. YouTube is a social platform. Yep, and it’s getting to be even more social with the addition of the community tab and a coming-soon Stories-like feature. You’re going to have to roll your YouTube strategy into your general social media strategy, so start laying the groundwork now to get control of YouTube on your team.

Social Media Guide For Thought Leaders

This is a handy one-pager guide on using Facebook, Twitter and blogs. We distribute it at faculty, staff and student workshops and it’s a nice at-a-glance handout.

Download the full PDF