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I’m Not a Regular Higher Ed YouTuber, I’m a COOL Higher Ed YouTuber

I feel like YouTube has been a part of my higher ed stump speech for a couple of years now, but this year, we’re finally getting to implement some of the goals we’ve had around YouTube here at Duke for a while now. Allow me to explain.

We’ve decided that YouTube isn’t just a bucket for holding video content. It’s actually social media. I’ll show you what I mean. Get in, loser.

Girls in convertible, caption: "Get in loser, we're going shopping," from the movie Mean Girls

Lots of higher ed institutions and brands use YouTube to house their video content so that they can embed it in other places, like on their website. YouTube works great for that, but there are so many more things that you can do with YouTube. Let me show you.

Here’s Doritos’ YouTube channel page:

Screenshot of the Doritos YouTube channel page

Not bad, and I really love Doritos as a brand. BUT, here’s the YouTube channel page of one of my favorite YouTubers, Mamrie Hart.

Screenshot of Mamrie Hart's YouTube channel page

Looks different, right?

We’ve got the Doritos brand account, which basically just holds their video content that they’ve already created for somewhere else, like TV or their website. It isn’t using all of the YouTube channel page features, including custom thumbnails and end cards. Plus it has weird titles on the videos.

Mean girls gif with caption "Boo, you whore."

(If you haven’t seen Mean Girls, please ignore all my gif jokes.)

Now look at the YouTuber channel page. Mamrie is producing content with a series model so subscribers know what they’re going to get, she’s using YouTube’s interactive features, she’s got a featured video in the feature hole on her channel page, and she’s got branded thumbnails. Let’s break all of these down a bit more.

Mean Girls dancing in Christmas costumes

Series Model Content

Why would you want content in a series model? Well, one of the goals of YouTube is to get subscribers, and one way to do that is to have content that your potential subscribers can expect to see. We want our subscribers to be obsessed with our content.

Mean girls gif with caption, "Why are you so obsessed with me?"

Crash Course does an amazing job with series. They have lots of different series on their channel, but they’re all branded a little bit differently and they all stay on topic. You can have as many series as you want on your channel, and series content is what’s really going to get those subscribe clicks.

Screenshot of a few of Crash Course's series

What kind of content should you be creating? Well, rather than re-inventing the wheel, check out Matt Gielen’s The Taxonomy of YouTube Videos. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about what kinds of content work best on YouTube.

Explainers tend to work well for the higher ed space, so a couple of our new series will be this type of video. Extra Credit is a series we’ve recently launched. Here’s one episode:

Channel Optimization

There are lots of ways to optimize your YouTube channel, beyond just what kind of content you create. Here are the secrets to optimizing your YouTube channel:

Mean Girls gif with caption, "That's why her hair is so big -- it's full of secrets."

Descriptions

Your descriptions should be, well, descriptive. That means that they should say what’s actually in the video and use keywords that people might use to discover your video. Remember, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, behind only Google. Get those keywords in there! Search engines read just like humans do, so be sure to put the most important words and concepts at the beginning of the description.

Captions

Captioning your videos is not only important for accessibility, but also for Search Engine Optimization. YouTube actually reads the captions you generate to serve up better search results for people. Also, it’s just plain nice to caption your videos. Be a good citizen. Caption your videos.

Titles

Titles are really important for the search function on YouTube, too. One mistake I see people make with series content is putting the name of the series first before the content of the video. This gives the name of the series more weight in the search algorithm, when really people are probably searching for the actual content of your video, not the series name. Here’s how LEGO titled one of their videos in the Rebrickulous series:

Screenshot of LEGO video with title, "LEGO Floating Tower Challenge - REBRICKULOUS"

You’ll note that important keywords like “LEGO” and “Challenge” come before the name of the series.

Thumbnails

The thumbnails for your video are part of the language of YouTube, and you’re just going to look like you know what you’re doing better on YouTube if you create YouTube-esque thumbnails. As in the LEGO example above, thumbnails usually have lots of bright colors, pictures of action and people’s faces, and the title of the video. They should look good in a small format. Pro tip: Don’t put your logo or watermark in the bottom right corner, because the time stamp for the video will always go in that corner on the thumbnail.

WVU has some of the most excellent higher ed thumbnails I’ve ever seen.

End Screens

Ok, let’s talk about end screens. I have feelings about end screens. A lot of feelings.

Mean Girls gif with caption, "I just have a lot of feelings."

End screens are a YouTube-only functionality. If you’re using end screens, it tells YouTube viewers that you created this content for them, not for all of your other platforms. It tells them that YouTube isn’t an afterthought, but a strategy for you.

Bonus, you can also get some Call-To-Actions in your end screens and I know you marketers get all happy about that stuff. (I’m a marketer too, so I can say that.) Most end screens include a subscribe button and links to a couple other videos that people might like to watch after watching what they just saw. Here’s ours for the Extra Credit video I embedded above:

Changing How We Promote Video

Normally when we put video up on social media, it makes the most sense to direct-upload the video file to whatever channel we’re going to use (Facebook or Twitter or whatever). The channel algorithms highly favor direct uploads because it keeps people on that platform rather than sending them somewhere else.

But what do you do when you’ve got a YouTube-first strategy and want people to interact with end screens and hit the subscribe button? Well, you change how you work a bit.

Embedding is, of course, the easiest way to promo YouTube videos. If you’re embedding the YouTube video, you don’t lose any of the functionality like end screens and captions, and all of the views get counted in your YouTube analytics, no matter where the video is embedded.

For Facebook, we’ve done a bit of experimenting, and it seems to work best to link to a Duke Today story where we’ve embedded the video, rather than linking straight to YouTube. The algorithm favors our website over YouTube for some reason.

For Twitter and Instagram, we’re running really cool preview videos, formatted for the platform and using a link to the full YouTube video.

So Does it Work?

Our preliminary data says YES, we’re getting more views compared to our typical non-series videos, and picking up more subscriptions to our channel, but we’ll get back to you when we have more numbers. We’re still in the early stages of experimenting with YouTube this way, but we’re super excited about it and we hope you will be too.

Student-Run Social Media: Make it Work for You

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

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

Well now you do!

Here’s how we’re set up:

Student editors posing
Last year’s team of editors
(I don’t have a group pic yet this year because several of our editors are studying abroad!)

We have approximately one student editor per @DukeStudents channel. I say approximately because we have a couple of people who run multiple channels, and our Instagram channel has two editors. (It works better that way for content flow.) One of these editors is our editor-in-chief, who runs strategy, analytics, and the process of keeping everyone on track. We’ve found it works a lot better when we let them be in charge of each other. I’m basically just there in case they get stuck on something.

These editors are paid! We meet in person (or via Google Hangouts for the study abroad students) once every two weeks, but the rest of their work is done off-site whenever they have time. We keep things organized on a team Slack. We try really hard not to over-schedule them. They do a lot remotely and they work different hours than I do, so it works better for everyone this way.

You might be surprised to know that the student editors have full control over their respective accounts. That means that they don’t have to submit drafts to anyone for review, and they are allowed to choose and curate what they want to post! (More on how we make that work later.)

We also have a team of content contributors. They are mostly underclassmen and are unpaid. There are about 40 of them! We meet with them once a month and keep in touch online via GroupMe. They’re each assigned one of the paid editors as their mentor for a set period of time, and then they rotate to a different editor. This gives them exposure to a lot of different social media channels. Their job is to contribute content to the editors for each of the different channels. Eventually, we hire our student editors from this group, so being a content contributor is almost part of the interview process to be a student editor.

Here are the rules:

People usually gasp and clutch their pearls when I tell them the students don’t have to submit drafts to me before they post, but we do have a pretty solid set of time-tested rules that all of the editors know and follow. I do read their posts once they go up, and on the rare occasion I have to ask them to take something down, but they’re actually usually even more careful than I would be with the rules I’ve given them.

The rules go thusly:

  • The “Grandma Rule:” If your grandma wouldn’t want to see it, don’t post it.
  • No references to alcohol, parties, drugs (and no red Solo cups, no matter what’s in them)
  • Nothing dangerous
  • No content promoting Greek or SLG organizations (This is because we don’t want to accidentally play favorites, so it’s just easier to not promote any of them.)
  • No profanity, including phrases like “AF,” or hashtags that contain profanity (like #GTHC and #DDMF)
  • Do not insult other schools, even in reference to sports
  • Follow NCAA athlete recruitment rules
  • Do not answer admissions questions. Always redirect to Admissions!

These rules really take care of most of the problems we might have with what to post and what not to post. It really helps to begin a group like this with the rules in mind so that you can be clear about expectations. We’ve found that once the expectations are established, the more freedom we can give them, the better. More freedom equals more creativity!

It’s also helpful to remember that they are students, and students are human, and humans mess up sometimes. They’re going to mess up. (To be fair, so are you.) So with that in mind, make sure that you have a plan in place for when they mess up or need help and a way they can contact you anytime.

Hiring:

I mentioned above that we hire to our paid student editors team from the pool of content creators. This gives us at least an academic year to make a determination about whether the student is enthusiastic about @DukeStudents or not, and we’re hiring for enthusiasm, not necessarily skill. You can teach skills. (Doing social media isn’t brain surgery, guys– hate to break it to you.) You cannot teach enthusiasm.

Student editors in a silly pose
Enthusiasm!

Other ways students can help you:

If you don’t want to set up social media that your students can run on their own, there are lots of other ways to use the talent of your students:

  • Use them as a focus group! They know really cool stuff. Ask them about new social media channels and how they use social media.
  • Have them collect content for you! Most of them already know how to shoot great video on their phones and have an eye for what will work in an Instagram feed.
  • Occasionally make them do boring stuff. No one likes spreadsheets, but let’s be real. You’re the grown-up here and it won’t kill them to copy-paste for a couple of hours.

In conclusion, students are awesome!

Get yourself a team of them and see how much more fun they make your job!

Social Media Accessibility at Duke

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

Video Captioning

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

Screen capture of video with captions featuring President Price

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

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

Image Tagging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scheduling

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

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

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

Hacks to Make Things Easier

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

Screencapture of Twitter card example
This is a Twitter card!

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

More on Accessibility

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

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

Trends in Social Media

What should you be looking out for in social media for 2019? I recently gave a talk about this at Duke, and here’s some of what I think is coming:

Video

  • Live video is still a big trend this year, but it’s even more engaging and interactive!
  • Keep an eye on native LinkedIn video.
  • Create with mobile in mind.
  • Look for more YouTube content from Duke University this year!
Aaron Chatterji is one of Duke’s LinkedIn video stars!

Speaking of LinkedIn…

Is it the year of LinkedIn? They’re rolling out lots of new features lately. We’ve seen huge growth in native video uploads, especially first-person explainer-style formats. LinkedIn also recently relaunched Groups with new features. We’ve found that the articles we post on Duke’s LinkedIn page give us pretty good referral numbers to our website.

Messaging Apps

You all know about Facebook Messenger, and I hope you’re paying attention to your Facebook page’s inbox. But did you know that you can now do ads in Messenger?

WhatsApp also just launched WhatsApp Business, and while we’re not doing anything there yet, I’m definitely keeping an eye on it.

And, yeah, Snapchat is still a player here! While the stories-format content is easier and sometimes more popular on Instagram now, Snapchat is still an important 1-to-1 communication tool for many of our students.

More on Stories

Yep, we’re still talking about the stories format. It’s the big new thing! So what does that mean for you?

Source: Buffer

It means you’re going to have to start thinking about vertical video if you haven’t yet. Gone are the days when I’d constantly yell at people to turn their phone horizontal to make videos. Now vertical video is a totally legit format!

It also means you have a great opportunity to make in-the-moment, less produced content, and for those of us with a small team, this is great news!

Music

A couple of apps based on the idea of music are up-and-coming. Of course there’s Spotify, which lets you create public playlists. (Check out the @DukeStudents Spotify!)

And if you have teenagers around you at all, you probably also know about TikTok (formerly Musical.ly). We don’t have an institutional TikTok account yet, but we might in the future!

My prediction? Apps and social media with huge music libraries are going to keep being kind of a big deal!

Social Media’s Reputation

Social media took a big hit this year. People are questioning everything that’s posted, stupid viral stunts are hitting the news, users are worrying about their privacy (and rightly so!) and some are even leaving social media all together.

As brands, it’s our job to make the spaces we control on social media as safe as possible for our fans and followers. Puppy pictures are always a good place to start, just sayin’.

What kind of content does “Big Duke” share?

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

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

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

Topics

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

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

Made-for-social video

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

Beautiful graphics or portraits

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

Vertical slides

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

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

Social Media Analytics for Beginners

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

What should you measure?

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

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

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

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

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

How do you measure?

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

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

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

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

Livestreaming at Duke: How, When, Why

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

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

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

Quick & Dirty

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

You’ll need:

  • Your phone

And maybe a few other things:

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

Hangouts-Style

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

On the Cheap

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

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

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

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

Studio Produced

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

We livestream Duke’s commencement ceremony this way.

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

Great livestreams all have a few things in common:

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

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

Takeaways for Higher Ed from VidCon 2018

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

Sonja & Laura in the emoji photo booth at VidCon

YouTube!

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

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

What should your branding and subject matter be on YouTube?

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

Facebook!

Facebook has some interesting video formats to play with.

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

LinkedIn!

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

Snapchat!

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

Content!

We talked a lot about educational content at VidCon.

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

How can you stay on top of trends?

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

Working with Students

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

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

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

But also,

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Join the Blue, #Duke2022!!! 🔵😈🎉🎊

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on

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

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

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.