Author: Joseph Field

Social media manager at Sheffield Hallam University.

Social media guidelines: thought leadership, getting started and (more) content

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The communications and development team on an away day hike up Mam Tor. Just because.

I’ve added a few new sections to our social media guidelines over the last week or so. (Picture unrelated – it’s me and the communications and development team on top of Mam Tor on our away day recently)

The first is about thought leadership. I’ve been speaking to a lot of colleagues recently about blogging, and its potential for raising their profiles and highlighting their expertise. It’s something that the University’s news and PR team are keen to drive forward, too.

There’s a huge crossover between social media and traditional media when it comes to thought leadership. Media outlets are always looking out for expert opinion, and we’re fortunate that we have examples of our own academics’ blogs being picked up by news media.

Hopefully this new section will allow us to develop a programme of support and training for academics at Sheffield Hallam who want to raise their profiles, promote research and network with other experts.

Sheffield Hallam's VC, Chris Husbands

A great example of someone who uses digital platforms for thought leadership: Sheffield Hallam’s VC, Chris Husbands

The second update to the guidelines is a ‘getting started’ guide. I’ve previously avoided doing this, because a lot of people at Hallam have passed the point of needing help in getting started. We’ve had lots of support from our learning technology teams and social media experts like Sue Beckingham (another great user of digital for thought leadership) in getting our social media profiles up-and-running.

But there are new developments in technology all the time, changes to the ways platforms operate (or how people use them) and some people may just be late to the party. So the ‘getting started’ guide is hopefully helpful to colleagues who are thinking of utilising social media for teaching and learning, promotion of events, student engagement or thought leadership.

There will be gaps. Communication is a huge subject, and different people want different things from their social media guidelines. And, currently, these guidelines don’t get particularly granular: there’s not a section on the difference between a Facebook page, group and profile, for example.

Maybe there needs to be. That’s why the guidelines exist in this format, instead of a Word document on the staff intranet: they can change and grow to meet the needs of the organisation.

Lastly, I’ve updated the section on content planning to include more detail. I hope it’s useful.

To round this post off, here are some general social media tips from Warwick University’s digital thinker-and-doer Dave Musson. If you haven’t met Dave, or seen him speak at an event, he’s a real expert on digital engagement, and has a genuinely collaborative approach to communications. Enjoy.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

When the World Cup came to Sheffield

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For a week in April this year, we used Sheffield Hallam’s main Twitter account – @sheffhallamuni – to run a daily give-away, utilising Twitter’s excellent polls functionality. Every day for a week, users could vote in a poll on our timeline for the chance to win a branded hoodie.

Of course, we did it for a reason. We didn’t just have piles of burgundy hoodies lying around we wanted to get rid of. We had an objective: fun.

Okay, that’s over-simplifying it, but it’s essentially right. Organisations do a lot of promoting on social media – ‘shouting’ about this, ‘making some noise’ about that – and they forget that social media is about conversations.

In order to have a conversation with someone, you need to listen to them.

The impetus for doing a give-away came from that simple premise: we wanted to ask our followers a question, and engage them in a dialogue. Specifically, we were interested in our current students, who are our most engaged audience on Twitter. And it coincided perfectly with Varsity – the city’s annual celebration of student sport.

Varsity is a real celebration of student sport in Sheffield, and an opportunity to highlight the sense of belonging among students.

Varsity is a real celebration of student sport in Sheffield, and an opportunity to highlight the sense of belonging among students.

In order for it to succeed, we knew it had to be something fun and conversational, that our followers would want to take part in. We wanted to run it over a few days, to build up a bit of momentum – and for it to feel like an event.

Lastly, we wanted to celebrate the great city that we’re proud to be a part of.

So we came up with the World Cup of Sheffield. For five days, our followers would tell us what they thought was the best thing about Sheffield. And on the last day the final would decide what the best thing in Sheffield was.

So, once again, here are the component pieces of our give-away:

  • fun
  • conversational
  • about students
  • celebrates Sheffield
  • sport theme
  • sustained

What was the goal? Brand affinity. We wanted to have some fun with a very engaged audience – current students – and let them know that we listen to them, and care what they think (and say).

How do you measure something like that? Engagement. You want people to take part . . . and hopefully even have some fun with it.

And here’s what we did. (Disclaimer: I had a bit of help from a small group of students, who came up with some suggestions of what we should include in the polls.)

We cued the competition up, explaining the format before we launched into the first poll. Day one resulted in 132 votes, 69 likes and a couple of RTs. There were no replies, but we learned that our followers really like Tamper Coffee.

On day two we asked our followers to vote for their favourite cinema.

Although there were less votes, there was a slight increase in the number of likes. We started to have some fun with Twitter’s selection of gifs.

Engagement stayed at a similar level on day three, but the conversation started to take shape, and some of the local businesses we were talking about joined in.

Day four was marred by controversy – the topic of gig venues in Sheffield is emotive. Questions were asked.

And things got tense.

The number of votes and likes was a lot higher than previous days. Why? There are a number of possibilities, including:

  • the sustained approach was generating more interest
  • our followers are more engaged later in the week
  • the poll subject was more relevant to our audience
  • all of the above

Friday was the final round of #WorldCupSheff, in which all of the week’s winners went up against each other to determine the Best Thing in SheffieldTM.

And there you have it. A clear winner.

Let’s go back to our original plan:

Fun

Was it fun? Well, we certainly enjoyed watching the poll results come in, and the conversations that developed each day. But let’s look at our total levels of engagement.

During #WorldCupSheff week (17-23 April 2016) we had a total of 56 replies to our tweets, 103 RTs, 10 RTs with comments, and 582 likes. Our total level of engagement (9,108 individual engagements) was a 107.9% increase on the previous week (4,381 individual engagements).

And engagement is a decent indicator of people having fun – it means they’re enjoying your content, and finding it relevant and interesting.

So we’ll conclude that it was fun. What was the next objective?

Conversational

This is straightforward: the World Cup of Sheffield was a conversation. We asked people a question, they told us an answer, and they asked questions of us. And the stats support that statement, with 78% of our posts being conversational during that week, and 22% of them being classed by our social media monitoring software as ‘updates’.

About students

The World Cup of Sheffield was all about students. The branded hoodies, the venues, cafés and restaurants, which were suggested by a small group of students . . . it was a conversation about student life in Sheffield. And a quick scan of the users who liked the posts shows that the most engaged audience was Sheffield Hallam students.

Celebrates Sheffield

From burritos to gig venues, cinemas to café culture, this was all about the Steel City.

Sport theme

It was the World Cup . . . of Sheffield. That’s quite a sporty theme.

Sustained

It ran for a week, and gained momentum towards the end. The length of time it ran for felt right, and it needed a few days to pick up pace.

What did we get out of #WorldCupSheff? Our goal was brand affinity, and a sense of good will among our followers. We eased off on promotion, shouting and making noise, and for a week we had fun, rewarding engagement with daily prizes.

Would we do it again? Definitely. I can see #WorldCupSheff making a return on a regular basis. The investment is minimal, and we ran a week-long brand affinity campaign for the cost of a few hoodies and a bit of staff time.

Would I change anything? Yes, if only to make sure we weren’t repeating ourselves. Getting input from students was really important in making the content relevant, and that’s something we could develop further.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve it next time, leave me a comment, or tweet me.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

LinkedIn 3D conference: 7 key themes and a few takeaways

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Cherry blossom in Spring at University of Birmingham

The venue was University of Birmingham’s beautiful campus. Photo by Jonathan Crannage.

This week, I took part in the LinkedIn3D conference at the University of Birmingham, presenting a few stats about our University Page before starting a conversation about content – what works, what doesn’t. I was joined by Higher Education professionals from three key areas: careers, alumni and marketing-communications.

The conference, organised by LinkedIn’s education evangelist Charles Hardy, was opened by the always-brilliant Eric Stoller, and has since been documented comprehensively by Warwick University’s digital comms expert Dave Musson.

The format was free-and-easy, with much of the content on the day being shaped by those in attendance. Some key themes emerged early on, and they’re themes that will resonate with anyone in Higher Education who uses social media to support their work.

Here they are:

One team working

Large organisations have trouble getting teams to talk to each other, let alone work with each other. At Sheffield Hallam, planning for our showcase sessions has spurred us on, and we’re in the process of setting up a LinkedIn working group, dedicated to planning content and finding opportunities to make the most of the platform.

What we’re finding is that it’s difficult to get people from every single area round a table, so start with a core of people who can get on with it. Eventually, others will join in.

Content

Eric Stoller said it best in his keynote: “University Pages showcase the vibe of your institution, through the content you post and the comments people leave.”

Unsurprisingly, a lot of discussion throughout the day was about the amorphous subject of content. I opened the marcomms track by showcasing some of the things I’d been posting on Hallam’s University Page. In particular, a nostalgic post about our old campus on Psalter Lane, which has generated 149 likes and 39 comments so far.

That’s a really high level of engagement, and it continues to get more. In general, good content on LinkedIn seems to have more longevity than Facebook or Twitter, which are usually home to fleeting moments. Replying to comments is important, if you want to keep the conversation going, and doing it in a personal way usually gets better results.

Dave Musson talked us through his approach at Warwick: they post once a day, early on in the day, and it tends to get good engagement.

There was a lot of talk of LinkedIn’s interface, how to get round the lack of formatting options, and its lack of native video.

My lightbulb moment happened when the discussion moving towards the idea of alumni-generated content. Jonathan Crannage, digital content co-ordinator at Loughborough University, is a Sheffield Hallam alumnus, and tweeted me during the workshop about his collection of Psalter Campus photos.

That kind of approach to user-generated content would be really interesting to try on a University Page, and I’m keen to try it out.

Groups

A lot of people still use discussion groups to broadcast. At Sheffield Hallam we haven’t cracked that nut either.

The best advice came from Charles Hardy, who said that “groups need watering”. Online conversations take place between a number of people, so if you’re relying on one person opening the door to a group once a week and shouting into an empty room, you’re doing it wrong.

You can start a conversation from nothing, by involving a few people. So ask a question, prod people, and see what you can get moving. Someone raised a really good point about discussion groups: what can we offer our alumni through those groups, that benefits us and them in a mutually beneficial way? If you can answer that, your groups will suddenly become hives of activity and outcomes.

Eric Stoller suggested trying ‘ask me anything’ style Q&As with careers teams in groups. We’ll definitely give this a try.

Engaging stakeholders

This theme was originally about engaging academics, but was extended to ‘stakeholders’ after the morning’s workshops.

There was some discussion of employer engagement through Company Pages (as well as groups), but my biggest takeaway was around blogging. We talked about encouraging academics to blog on LinkedIn’s Pulse platform, but what about careers teams? Alumni relations teams?

If HE professionals start blogging on LinkedIn, University Pages can use that content to engage alumni, and group-owners can use those blogs to start conversations.

Another lightbulb moment: get your VC to blog on Pulse.

Also, hashtags work in Pulse. Seriously. Go try it now: search in ‘Posts’ for a hashtag and see what comes up. You’ll be amazed.

Employer engagement

Another theme that morphed and merged throughout the day, fitting into the ‘Engaging stakeholders’ breakout session in the afternoon. I’ll be honest, I don’t have much experience of doing this, and there was very little discussion in the sessions I was in of how to do it.

I’d probably do this through groups, as well as our Company Page, which is currently used more for employer brand stuff.

LinkedIn features

Charles Hardy was good enough to invite critical feedback from delegates on what they want from LinkedIn, and what features they’d want to see in the future. He also broke the news of LinkedIn’s new student app, which launched in the US this week.

I asked for a Pages Manager app. Pretty please, with sugar on top. We want notifications, a better interface, and to get away from our desks.

Native video is happening, although we don’t have an idea of when. But metrics and analytics are on the way, according to Charles. And Company and University Pages will soon be merged, making our lives easier.

So lots of good things on the horizon for HE professionals using LinkedIn, and it’s encouraging that they’re so keen to reach out to a very engaged audience, talk to them and listen to feedback.

If anything in the post resonates with you, let me know in the comments. Especially if you’re doing anything a bit different and interesting with groups.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

A new Home for the Arts in Sheffield

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Early last year, Sheffield Hallam announced a long-term lease on Sheffield’s former Head Post Office, a Grade II listed building that held many memories for local people. The building had sadly fallen out of use for some years, and was now in need of some serious work.

The renovated building would be home to students from the University’s Institute of Arts, and they would be making and doing loads of creative and interesting projects in the space. The move was clearly a great opportunity to use our communications work to raise Sheffield Hallam’s profile and engage members of the public.

Sheffield's old Head Post Office

Sheffield’s old Head Post Office

We started the planning process by identifying some key aims that would drive our approach. They were:

“Communicate Sheffield Hallam’s sympathy for the heritage of the building and surrounding area, and highlight our sustainable approach to our presence in the city region.”

“Celebrate the Sheffield Institute of Arts and promote the outstanding teaching that is currently delivered by the Institute.”

And the move into the space would clearly have a positive impact on the student experience, helping to create a sense of community cohesion among our art and design students.

So, with some objectives in place, we started to throw ideas around for a social media campaign. The concept that really stuck with us was the idea of the University creating a new home for the arts in the city – a space that wasn’t just for students but, taking into account the public gallery and café, would be for the people of Sheffield.

And that’s why we settled on #HomeForTheArts as a way of aggregating social content. We knew that we wanted lots of visual content, and that Instagram would play an important role for us.

We were fortunate enough to have a brilliant photographer working with us, documenting the whole process. India Hobson, who we’d worked with on other projects, was commissioned to photograph the restoration process at regular intervals, gaining access to all areas of the building.

The Head Post Office interior, by India Hobson

The Head Post Office interior, by India Hobson

The next thing we did was seek out a few Instagrammers who were interested in architecture in the Sheffield area. We found a few, and messaged them to invite them to our very first Instameet. In the end, we took around 12 Instagrammers on a tour of the building, co-ordinated with our partners M3, who were overseeing the restoration.

Well in advance of the tour, we sent them a brief, which included when and where to meet,  what to expect, what they would and wouldn’t be able to get access to, and what the hashtag for the restoration was. This ensured that we’d be able to aggregate their content, share it and help develop a narrative about the building’s restoration.

https://twitter.com/tashbright/status/647305870871785472

We also did our first Periscope, broadcasting from inside the building and the rooftop, which has incredible views of the city.

By inviting a group of enthusiastic photographers on a tour of our building, we reached new audiences, and our Instagrammers helped us communicate our key messages about the building.

The Instameet (and subsequent tours for other groups) allowed us to:

  • announce the restoration project to new audiences
  • develop a bit of a buzz online about the building
  • create a feeling of goodwill towards our sympathetic treatment of the building
  • give local people a sense of ownership of the space

https://twitter.com/faveplaces/status/652567620219215873

It also created an opportunity to talk longer-term about heritage: for the building, and for the Institute of Arts. Again, we had a narrative, and we used behind-the-scenes photos of the restoration and archive shots of the building to talk about our resurrection of the building for arts and culture in the city.

And, in terms of measurement and evaluation, engagement was the key metric. We were looking for shares, likes and replies – and hopefully those replies would be opportunities to further develop the narrative around our role in the city.

Outcomes for the campaign? Well, we have social media users acting as advocates for the University, talking about us restoring an iconic building to create a home for arts and culture in the city. But the real impact will be felt once we start to use the building for public events like the degree show and Catalyst Festival.

I hope the groundwork that was done with the #HomeForTheArts campaign means that people still feel a connection with the building, albeit one that’s shaped as much by the work our art and design students do in the building as it is the rich heritage of the building, and the people who used to work there.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

 

#SocMedHE15: starting the conversation about social media for learning

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Long post alert! This post originally appeared in the University’s showcase magazine, Review, as a full-length feature of about 800 words. But it’s a really interesting piece about a fantastic social media conference, and it’s worth sharing here.

In December, a team of educational developers from Sheffield Hallam organised the first ever conference on the use of social media for learning in higher education.

The Social Media for Learning in Higher Education 2015 Conference featured over 60 speakers from eight different countries, and from 35 different higher education institutions, and other digital learning organisations.

Helen Rodger, senior lecturer in digital capability, was part of the conference organising committee. She says there was a clear need for a sector-wide conversation about the impact and application of social media on the global learning landscape. And the team were confident that Sheffield Hallam was the right institution to start this conversation.

She says: “The boundaries of social media are changing all the time. More tools and opportunities are emerging, and behaviours are adapting. It’s important that educators recognise and engage with the impact that social literacies have on business and society, learn to harness the power of social media, while remaining mindful of the wider challenges.

“We had three major themes for the conference: the changing learning landscape, the applied use of social media in teaching and learning, and the challenges faced by individuals and institutions in responding to changes. But, in the end, what really mattered was that people, who were all desperate to talk about it, came together to share their experiences of social media in learning, to become a community and begin the conversation.”

Education consultant and Inside Higher Ed blogger Eric Stoller delivered the opening keynote, offering his predictions for ways that UK universities could harness the power of social media tools.

A conference visitor using virtual reality technology

A conference visitor trying out Samsung’s virtual reality technology

Eric says: “Social media will continue to be used by universities for marketing and communications in 2016. However, an emphasis on the student experience will drive more use of social media by areas like student services, academic advising, career development, financial literacy, and mental health.

“The greatest areas of impact will be in career development – using social media to enhance employability – and as part of a digital identity component of a university’s digital capability scheme.

“I think there are going to be more individual administrators who start to use social media for student success and engagement. Marketing, communications, and PR are already using digital channels, but the real breakthrough will be when student services operations work in tandem via social media to support the student journey once on campus.

“In the US, there are scores of institutions using social media to enhance teaching and learning. In the UK, it’s a bit less consistent. I know that Sue Beckingham at Sheffield Hallam has done a lot of work with digital identity and LinkedIn for teaching and learning.

“Social media adoption in higher education has been much slower than in the business world. When universities realised that social media could be used for engagement, support, teaching, learning, and community-building, that’s when things started to change. Digital channels enhance the work of academics and educators, and in 2015 and beyond, today’s student needs to be fluent in using social media for the purposes of employability and career development.”

Helen agrees that things are moving quickly for higher education institutions, and that staff also need to be digitally fluent, but also to be flexible and responsive.

She says: “As practitioners, we’re surfing a very large wave at the moment, and it’s one that can change direction at any time. Sharing best practice and learning from each other are central to us adapting to the opportunity.

“The thing that really came across from the 2015 conference was the focus on the development of digital capabilities, particularly in the area of managing professional identities in digital spaces.”

Based on last year’s success, and the need to keep up with the constantly changing landscapes of education and social media, the 2016 conference is already shaping up to be bigger and more focused, to pick up on the significant related issues faced by higher education.

“We’ve had a huge amount of positive feedback from presenters and delegates,” Helen says. “Including lots of feedback from Sheffield Hallam staff who were involved. Overwhelmingly, the message was how great it was to be a part of this leading edge discussion, and how it made them feel proud to be a part of this University. The next step for us is to evaluate the conference to understand more about what why social media for learning is important, and this focus informs our strategies for the future.

“The conference had a huge impact in terms of reputation. Sheffield Hallam University is beginning to be known internationally for leading a critical discourse about the use of social media for learning in higher education. And that’s something everyone at Sheffield Hallam can have a role in.”

Want to get involved in #SocMedHE16? Submissions are now being accepted for the 2016 Social Media for Learning in Higher Education conference. And you can follow @SocMedHE on Twitter for more information.

Joe Field, social media manager

Graduation 2015: a strategic approach to social

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People sometimes ask me about our ‘social media strategy’. The truth is that we don’t have one – nor do we need one.

We do have a communications strategy which covers the strategic use of social media to raise profile and manage reputation.

And that’s the right approach. We don’t have a ‘telephone strategy’, or an ’email strategy’. When it comes to social media, we have content strategies, guidelines and a range of different functions that we provide with social media tools.

What we do with social media directly supports our communications strategy. I’ll use the example of our Graduation 2015 campaign to illustrate how.

For two weeks in November, our students took to the stage in Sheffield’s City Hall, shaking hands with Professor Robert Winston and picking up their certificates.

#throwback #graduation #shugrad #proud #sheffield #sheffieldhallam

A photo posted by Camille (@camilleb236) on

It’s a key milestone in the student experience, and a real opportunity to demonstrate the sense of belonging – or brand affinity – among our student and alumni communities. And, by involving those communities in our social media campaign, we had the opportunity to show how vibrant the sense of belonging among students and alumni is to a range of external audiences.

We also wanted to use social media to enhance the experience of graduates during the fortnight of celebrations. So, working with graduate Tom Stayte and his innovative SquareShare social printing service, we gave them a reason to engage with it. By posting their photos to Twitter or Instagram, and tagging them ‘#SHUgrad’, they could get free printed copies, with details of our Alumni Connect service on each print.

On our own channels, we focused on the graduates themselves, ‘doorstepping’ them at the City Hall, and asking them what they loved most about their time at Sheffield Hallam.

As well as promoting engagement with #SHUgrad at the City Hall, we interacted with social media users in real time, offering personalised responses with a view to deepening engagement as conversations developed.

One of the key themes in our communications strategy is our role in the city region. We hold our graduation ceremonies in Sheffield’s City Hall, right in the heart of the city centre. By focusing on visual, student-led content, in and around the City Hall, we demonstrated our civic pride, and our role in providing education, skills and employability in the region.

Liam and my graduation on Friday the 20th! Had such an amazing day and we were so proud of one another 🙂 #shugrad

A photo posted by Kirsty O'Brien (@obrien_marie) on

Lastly, we communicated the University’s values around equality, diversity, and inclusion, by including a diverse range of students – from a range of backgrounds and academic areas – in the campaign.

The #SHUgrad campaign is a great example of a university using social media for community management. Teams from the university’s marketing, communications and alumni functions worked with students from the start, involving them in the campaign (by getting them to create the graduation video) and interacting with them throughout graduation fortnight.

That approach is fundamental to social media at Hallam: we want to show our audiences that we use social media to talk to, listen to, and get feedback from, student and alumni communities. And, by encouraging social media users to post about graduation from their own accounts (and share our posts) we reached new audiences.

Here are the stats: conversations about#SHUgrad led to 6,871,453 brand impressions, and 11,339 engagements with the @sheffhallamuni Twitter account alone. And the #SHUgrad hashtag trended in Sheffield every day for the whole two weeks.

On a personal level, it was also a really good example of teams from across the University working together, with students, on a key bit of University business. And it’s opened the door to even more collaborative, engaging approaches to social media at Hallam.

Joe Field, social media manager

Instagram takeover: letting students do the work

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For a week in March 2016, we gave control of Sheffield Hallam’s Instagram account to the SHUinsiders – a team of seven students who blog and post about student life in Sheffield. This post is about how we did it, what happened as a result, and what we learned from doing it.

I’d been thinking about doing a student takeover of the University’s Instagram account for a while, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, our follower growth had plateaued at two or three new followers per day. Secondly, putting students in the frame is at the heart of our approach to Instagram, and giving them the reins seemed like a great way of extending that. The challenge was finding the right students to do it.

Having worked with the SHUinsiders for a few months, and having got to know them as individuals, it felt like the time was right to take the plunge. I work with Helen Horton in student marketing on everything to do with the Insiders, so we got our heads together and made plans for a week-long takeover.

We started by floating the idea with the students, asking them how comfortable they felt with it. Overwhelmingly, they were very keen. We discussed the kind of content they might post, and the logistics of making it work. And we picked a week that worked for them, and for our social media content plans.

I put together a brief, and posted it in our private Facebook group – we use the group to manage and plan all of our activity with them. They had time to ask questions, and talk things through with each other, before we started the takeover. This was really important: if they hadn’t had time to chew things over and kick ideas around together, it would have been a different experience for them, and for our audience on Instagram.

The plan was very simple: a different student would post from the account each day. They would post a student’s-eye-view of life in Sheffield, and show what it’s like to be a student at Sheffield Hallam.

The takeover coincided with an open day, so we got Clarissa, Saturday’s SHUinsider, to post updates from the open day, as well as her own insights into life in the Steel City. Another SHUinsider, Jamilya, was on Erasmus exchange in Austria – a great bit of fortuity that we incorporated into the takeover.

This week, Hallam's Instagram account has been taken over by the #SHUinsiders – a team of student bloggers from the uni. Today, it's Jamilya (@jama_aa) a second year Events Management student! At the moment I'm on Erasmus exchange program in Austria at Kufstein University of applied science. Didn't really know what my first post should be about, so decided to go with the first thing that we explored in Kufstein. On our second day here we decided to walk to that beautiful lake with other Erasmus students. Most of them are from Europe: Netherlands, Slovakia, Lithuania, Turkey, England, Germany, but there are also some from Mexico and Morocco. I always enjoyed travelling and meeting new people from different countries and Erasmus exchange is a perfect opportunity to do so. Not sure if every Hallam student can apply for it, but if you study at SBS you definitely can! #shuinsiders #loveshu #erasmus #fhkufstein

A photo posted by #WeAreHallam (@sheffhallamuni) on

I changed the account password every night, in preparation for the next day (we briefed them in advance about what it would be on their day), and I changed the account bio to explain what was going on. The Insiders had some boilerplate text to paste at the beginning of each post, so it was clear who they were, and they included the #SHUinsiders tag in every post.

Most of them tagged their own accounts in each post as well. We didn’t ask them to do that, but it was really nice that they did. Generally, people are interested in other people, and making social content about people is always good.

This week, Hallam's Instagram account has been taken over by the #SHUinsiders – a team of student bloggers from the uni. Today, it's John, a first year Film Production Student! It's no secret that Sheffield has an exciting and varied musical history, as well as being home to a myriad of interesting people. Pictured above are newly wedded couple Alan and Donna Smyth, outside their studio, '2Fly'. As part of a uni project, I recently got to meet them, subsequently making a documentary about what they do. Alan is an accomplished music producer, with quite an impressive portfolio of artists under his belt. He is the man responsible for producing the Arctic Monkeys first album, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's what I'm not", as well as lending his hand to Pulp, Milburn and Reverend and the Makers alongside countless others. His passion for the Sheffield music industry is certainly palpable, and I'd encourage any aspiring local musicians and bands to get in touch with him via their Facebook page, as he is still producing to this day. His tip for who to keep an eye on this year are local band " I Set the Sea on Fire", and I have to agree, they're amazing, check them out!

A photo posted by #WeAreHallam (@sheffhallamuni) on

So, to recap, we wanted to increase the number of followers on our Instagram account. We did that. Our followers grew from 2,747 to 2,833 over the seven days of the takeover. We also wanted to raise the profile of the #SHUinsiders campaign. Although we don’t have stats on reach, the hashtag ‘#SHUinsiders’ was engaged with 819 times over the week. This suggests that users were clicking on the tag to explore other content.

And all of the students reported a small increase in followers on their own accounts, along with lots of new likes to their existing content. Finally, we wanted to demonstrate our willingness to talk to, listen to, and work with, our student community. It was really important to us that the takeover showed this, because so much of the work we do on social media is about developing and enhancing a sense of belonging among our student audiences.

The fact that there were 1,706 engagements (and counting) with the takeover posts, along with the growth in followers, shows the positivity that people responded with. And, anecdotally, all of the feedback we’ve had to the takeover has been really positive.

Is there anything I’d do differently? Possibly, but not because anything went badly. Giving the students the confidence to go out and be themselves was key. They needed a little bit of encouragement at first, but that’s completely understandable – it’s a big responsibility.

Instagram is the perfect channel for a student takeover, but I’m not sure I’d ever hand over a corporate Twitter account in the same way. There’s too much customer service happening in that space.

Lastly, the important question now (and maybe one which you’d be willing to answer in the comments) is ‘what next’?

Joe Field, social media manager

TL;DR version:

  • takeovers on Instagram are fun
  • planning is critical
  • so’s talking it over face-to-face, before you take the plunge
  • keep it unfiltered and authentic

 

What’s this blog for?

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When I first started in the role of social media manager at Sheffield Hallam last summer, I was overwhelmed by the positive responses I had from colleagues. The creation of the role demonstrated that this was a university that was taking social seriously and, for colleagues in the organisation, there was someone they could call on for help and advice.

And that’s what my role is about: helping people around the University do social well. Similarly, that’s what this blog is for. It’s somewhere that, as a University community, we can share thoughts, ideas, experiences and resources, so that we can learn from each other.

So it makes sense that posts won’t just come from me. Posts on this blog will come from a wide range of contributors: academics who are using social platforms for research, support teams who are using them to engage with students and provide services, and students who are using social tools to publish their own work and develop their own networks. We’ll share case studies of community management projects, promotional campaigns and approaches to teaching and learning.

This blog is also intended to be a useful resource. There will be guidelines, practical how-to guides, and links to other useful resources. If there’s something you’d like to see here, or if you’d like to contribute, get in touch.

Another important question is: who is this blog for? It’s primarily for Sheffield Hallam staff, in support of their work. But – in the interests of being social and sharing – all of the content on this blog is accessible to everyone. It’s important that we contribute to the knowledge economy, and show the world how committed we are to using social media to do good things.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

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