Tag Archives: social media at duke

How to Make the Most of Your Website on Social Media

To get the most out of your social media efforts, you’ll want to make sure that your website links show up properly. So today, we’re going to talk about the importance of ensuring your website looks great on social media and provide the tools that’ll help enhance your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

You’re likely already aware that each page of your website should have a title tag and meta description for SEO reasons. But did you also realize you can specifically customize how your website content displays on social media platforms? The customizations are called social media cards and they make your content more engaging by adding images and summaries when you (or anyone else for that matter) share your links on social media.

Similar to the meta tags that tell programmatic robots (like Google) about the pages on your site, social media bots scan the page associated with your link to determine what info should be displayed with it in a user’s newsfeed. If the bots can’t find anything, they take their best guess. The results can vary from boring to comical. But by enabling social media cards on your website, you can control these meta tags so social media platforms accurately determine the title, description, and image that gets displayed. 

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

Twitter Cards

The difference between a bare hyperlink and an engaging Tweet is a small bit of code on your link’s website.

In order for these lovely link previews to display on Twitter, your website must have Twitter Cards enabled. Adding a few lines of markup on your website means links to your content will have a “Card” with photo, title, and description to help drive readers to your content.

There are technically four different types of Twitter cards, but the one we find most useful is “Summary Card with Large Image.”

Once the correct meta tags are added to your webpage (either by you or your website administrator), you can run the URL through the validator tool to test how the link will look on Twitter. This tool also works for any website if you’d like to see what a link would look like before Tweeting. This is helpful since sometimes websites use different images in their meta tags than appear on the site itself.

A few notes:

  • The most commonly recommended image size for social media cards is 1200×628 since this size fits on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For Twitter, you’ll want your image to be at least 300×157 and no bigger than 4096×4096.
  • Often, Twitter Cards are set to pull the first image on a page as a default. Be careful with this since Twitter will crop the image to make it fit the card. You might end up with a pixelated version or a vertical headshot where only the person’s nose is visible.
  • If you update the tags for your page (say you found a typo in your title or need to switch out the image), you’ll want to use the Twitter Card validator to force Twitter to do a fresh scrape of your page’s URL. This will cause Twitter to pull the new meta tag, ensuring that the most recent, accurate information is shared. Otherwise, Twitter might pull from an outdated cache instead. 

Open Graph

Facebook and LinkedIn both generate link previews based on Open Graph meta tags. Like Twitter, if these Open Graph tags are missing or incomplete, the link preview will also be incomplete.

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

The Facebook Debugger is a great tool to see how a Facebook link will look before you post it. It’ll let you see all the information that the Facebook Crawler is pulling. Like Twitter, if you updated the image or preview text and it’s not displaying, click “Scrape Again” once or twice to force Facebook to get the updated information.

Recommendations from Facebook:

  • 200×200 pixels is the minimum allowed image dimensions.
  • The image file size cannot exceed 8 MB.
  • If your image is smaller than 600×315 pixels, it’ll still display but the size will be much smaller.
  • When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook Crawler scrapes and caches the meta data from the URL. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered, which means the first person who shares your link won’t see a rendered image. You can pre-cache your images and avoid this by running the URL through the Debugger.
  • If you update the image, the original share will continue to show unless you refresh it in the post.

Since LinkedIn also used Open Graph tags, it functions much like Facebook. The LinkedIn Post Inspector works just like the Facebook Debugger. Paste your URL and select “Inspect” to see what your link will look like on LinkedIn.

So if your site doesn’t currently have social media cards, we’d highly recommend having them added.

How to Setup Open Graph and Twitter Cards for WordPress

If various reasons prevent the addition of social media cards to your website, you can still share your content on social media. It’s just a little bit harder. 

Our recommendation is to share your text with the link and applicable image. Make sure to use the correct image size for the social media platform. Also, to meet accessibility standards, you’ll need to add alt text to the image. This can be done natively in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but only a few schedulers (Hootsuite, Sprout, etc.) have this feature. And lastly, we do have a Duke-branded link shortener available through Shib login.

So in summary, it’s key to properly manage your website content and how it displays on social media platforms rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn determine how it’s displayed for you. By optimizing Twitter Cards and Open Graph and validating the accuracy of your website content in how it’s displayed, you can curate your content specifically for each audience you have on different social channels.

Our Favorite Instagram Stories of the Year

2016 saw the advent of Instagram Stories (see our early take on it here) and it’s been full steam ahead for the feature ever since. Instagram Stories turn 2 years old today and show no sign of slowing down as a major media asset for the social platform. They have been especially powerful for brands and influencers, Duke included, as a driver of traffic to our content. In fact, Instagram Stories is our second most powerful referrer for content, behind Facebook.

We’ve experimented with creative storytelling from research stories to crowd-sourced content on our Stories this year. Here are a few of our favorites:

Trajan Forum

Working with the Stories features has really pushed us in terms of creativity and discovering new tools and skills. This piece we produced on how historians and archeologists use 3-D scanning to document and archive pieces of long-gone ancient structures really pushed us in terms of how to get the content in the format that we needed. I ended up taking screen recordings on my iPhone of the 3-D scans, moving them around with my finger using the functionality on the webpage they were stored on. Then I manually edited the clips within the iPhoto album to shave off the front bumper that would show me navigating to the proper screen. After that, I exported and emailed them to Sonja to fine tune in Final Cut Pro X for proper formatting for the vertical Stories layout. (This was prior to the resize feature introduction.) It was really great to highlight such a cool story and bring it to our broader audience in an interactive and tangible way via Stories.

American Ballet Theater Partnership

This was one of our first attempts at strategic storytelling using a Call to Action on Instagram Stories. It worked well because of the stunning visuals our colleagues provided, and it paired really well with a conveniently-timed beta-testing of animated video/GIF capabilities on Canva, our go-to tool for quick, easy, polished graphics.

Snow Day 2018

I love this one because it is the perfect example of crowdsourcing content at its finest. ICYMI, Durham had a few major snow days back in January and campus got a good bit of snow. The photographic results were stunning. The best part? Sonja and I compiled this content from users from the comfort of our couches in our PJs as everyone was snowed in for a couple days. Thankfully, our students didn’t let us miss out on content showcasing Duke as a winter wonderland. There was no call to action here, just a great opportunity to engage with our community by featuring their content on our feed. You can see the full feature on the highlight on our Instagram page.

Moving into the upcoming school year, we’re excited to continue experimenting with content and storytelling on this platform.

Working with Students

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

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

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

But also,

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Join the Blue, #Duke2022!!! 🔵😈🎉🎊

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on

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

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