Public engagement and social media, part two: Twitter threads, chats and LinkedIn articles

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In the previous post, I looked at setting objectives for your use of social media in a professional context, developing your online presence, and how you can collaborate with marketing-communications colleagues to promote your research.

In this post, I’m going to look in-depth at thought leadership on Twitter and LinkedIn, and highlight some ways you can start to engage in wider debates and raise your profile as a thought leader.

Being human vs being professional

Something that always comes up in discussions with academics is the line between the personal and professional. There’s a perceived risk in putting too much of ourselves into our online persona: what if we say the wrong thing? Someone might be offended, and we risk bringing our institution into disrepute.

But what’s the real risk?

Unless your political views are extreme, or you have outdated social values, your opinions are probably fine to share.

The bottom line is: use common sense. If you were in an open plan office, would you say the same thing? Treat online discussions the same as verbal discussions, and you’ll be fine.

In fact, there’s a risk in ‘always saying the right thing’. If we filter too much of ourselves out of our social media presence, constantly making sure that our updates and replies are corporately acceptable, our accounts can become bland and boring, and people might unfollow us.

Some people are comfortable separating themselves into two accounts: one professional, one personal. If you’re really concerned about saying the wrong thing, this may be the solution for you.

The no right answer that works for everyone. This is about your own values, your preferences and the culture of the people and organisations you work with. My own take on it is that the divide between the personal and professional are diminishing. The way people communicate online is changing, and people are much more comfortable expressing themselves openly.

So, if your activity on social media is a genuine reflection of who you are, your timeline will be more interesting, and people will be more likely to interact with you.

AkwugoAkwugo Emejulu’s Twitter account is a great example of an engaging academic profile. Her cover and profile images, for starters. She looks approachable and friendly, yet academic and knowledgeable.

Her username is her actual name, so she’s easy to find, and it’s clear that this is really her.

Names and faces will always be more interesting than logos and acronyms.

Akwugo’s biography tells us everything we need to know about her professional identity and research specialism, and we get a bit of flavour about who she is as a person. We can also see that Akwugo follows people, and she likes their tweets.

She doesn’t just broadcast: she replies and interacts, and this is a key part of thought leadership.

Telling stories in the real world

People and stories. When it comes down to it, that’s what social media is for. It shapes our approach to the marketing content we publish.

And, as experts, your storytelling starts with the people at the heart of day’s biggest stories.

Peter Neumann’s Twitter thread on the radicalisation of the Finsbury Park attacker is a very good example of expert analysis combined with storytelling. Peter starts with an analysis of the attacker, before exploring bigger themes around the process of radicalisation, current perceptions of radicalisation, and the spread of misinformation.

When the news is so bad, it’s important that there are rational, measured and academically-informed voices leading discussion and debate. Twitter is a great platform for doing that in real time, in response to current events.

Challenging current thinking, leading the debate

Twitter chats are a goo way to expand your network and learn from others, but they can also be a way to raise your profile by leading a discussion on a thought-provoking subject.

We’ve held a couple of Twitter chats recently. They were led by Hallam academics, in collaboration with the social media team here. The most recent one was led by Professor Laura Serrant, an expert on the nursing profession.

Twitter_promo_card_politicalnursing

You can see how it played out in this Twitter Moment, but essentially we engaged a large group of nursing professionals and academics in an hour-long debate about whether nurses should have more of a political voice.

From a Hallam point of view, we showcased one of our academics, and built on our reputation for being a real-world university. This kind of Twitter chat benefits from lots of planning, and genuine collaboration between communications professionals and academics.

LinkedIn has moved on, so should you

A lot of academics I speak to don’t realise how much LinkedIn has changed over the last couple of years. LinkedIn’s mission is to be the social platform for education and professional development. There’s a huge opportunity for universities here.

First, you can write articles on LinkedIn. If you publish regularly on LinkedIn, you have the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of readers (many of whom are 30-49 years old and, according to LinkedIn’s data, earn good salaries).

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn articles, go and explore. There’s a lot of good stuff out there. They’re picked up by search engines, they’re easily shared (you can tweet your LinkedIn articles), and people can like and comment, which gives you another opportunity to interact with followers.

Lastly, how people use LinkedIn is changing. Have a read of this incredible article by Guy Kawasaki for some evidence of that.

Ride the wave, not the board

Surfing pioneer Duke Kahanamoku was asked how he always stays on the board when he’s surfing. He reportedly said: “Ride the wave, not the board.”

This same thinking applies to social media and communication. I’ve outlined some ways you can use Twitter and LinkedIn to do public engagement and thought leadership, but there will be other tools and technologies that enable you to do the same thing.

There are bound to be things I’ve missed here. It’s such a big subject. I’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in developing your profile for public engagement. Let me know if there’s something I can help with.

Joe Field, social media manager

@joemcafield

How to write killer blogs and LinkedIn articles

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I’m putting together some toolkits for Hallam staff who are using social media to tell their stories and engage with their audiences.

So this is the first in a series. It’s a simple how-to guide for people who want to write blogs and LinkedIn articles.

I’ll repost this under a new ‘Toolkits’ sub-heading in the social media guidelines.

What should I write about?

Your blog – whether you’re hosting it on WordPress or posting it on LinkedIn – is a window into your expertise, and you as a communicator. A good blog isn’t used as somewhere to store research papers and resources, or a method of sending out information. It’s a way for people to get a sense of your expertise, your ideas and your values.

So you should write about those things. Your expertise is what makes you different. Your ideas are what people will take away from your blog, and your values are what will keep them coming back.

A great way to get started is to write about something that’s in the news, and examine it through the unique lens of your expertise, ideas and values.

How many words?

The ideal blog post or LinkedIn article length is anywhere from 600 to 800 words, depending on the amount of rich media that you’re including in the post.

Getting the structure right

Your first paragraph is important. Along with the headline, it’s the hook that convinces the reader to read on.

Try a few different ways of opening your post, and run them by friends and colleagues. You could reference a recent news event, explore a personal reflection, or make a dramatic statement.

Once you’ve hooked them, your reader is likely to skim-read, so use section breaks, sub-headings, lists and bullets to break blocks of text up, and keep paragraphs short (one to three sentences).

Images and videos do the same thing, and they can help you illustrate a point. Make sure you have usage rights for visual assets. You can use the search tools on Google image search to find images that have been labelled for reuse.

Always check the usage rights for images

Picture captions can be a fun way to highlight a key point and re-engage the reader

Embed URLs as hyperlinks, and set them to open in a new window, so that your readers stay on your blog.

You want to take your reader on a journey throughout your post, so promise them something juicy (revelation, insight, facts) early on, then deliver it in the middle section.

Wrap things up with key takeaways and learnings, but don’t worry about making your ending too neat and perfect. You can leave loose ends for another post.

If you’re in doubt about how to end the article, pose your readers a question. Ask for feedback, opposing views, other sources.

And remember: your blog post is supposed to be a conversation-starter. Ask for comments, and respond to them. Maybe you’ll get ideas for a follow-up post.

Language, tone and punctuation

Unless you’re writing for a niche audience, plain language is a good idea. So, if you want to reach a wider audience, keep jargon to a minimum.

Avoid cliches and archaic words and phrases (use ‘while’ instead of ‘whilst’, for example). Your sentences should be a maximum of 30 words long. Your grammar and punctuation are important, but don’t use overly-complicated punctuation (I heartily recommend R L Trask’s Penguin Guide to Punctuation, by the way – it busts a lot of myths).

Use exclamation points sparingly, and only ever one at a time. Question marks can be used as and when you need them, and are also solitary characters.

Pay attention to the rhythm of your writing. Vary the length of your sentences to add pace and dynamics. Try it. It’s fun.

And it’s fine to start the odd sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’. But don’t overdo it.

Your tone of voice should be warm, personal and direct (‘During the event, I was amazed to learn that…’, ‘By now, you’ve probably noticed that…’). If you’re writing something from a position of authority, you can afford to have a more authoritative tone of voice, but beware of sounding pompous.

I don’t recommend writing about yourself in the third person. Ever.

Remember, a blog post isn’t a news bulletin or an announcement. It’s more than technical writing: it should give the reader an insight into the situation or issue from the author’s point of view.

Your blog’s not just informative: we want to see the human being behind the words.

Different approaches to headlines

Write the headline last. You want to address the reader directly, so make it engaging. It could be counter-intuitive and subversive (‘Why face-to-face meetings are making you less productive’) – if that gives you a springboard into an interesting argument.

The list-article format (‘Six ways to manage your inbox’) works for some people, but don’t use it for every blog post, because your blog will start to look like clickbait.

Here are some common approaches for blog post titles:

  • Numbered lists: “Five cat photos that changed the internet”
  • Dates: “The best cats on the internet in January 2017”
  • Questions: “Why are cats so popular on the internet?”
  • Call-to-action: “Download our expert guide to cats on the internet”

Tags are important

Be sure to add some relevant tags to your post before you publish. They help people find your posts. You might want to use categories, if your blog has that functionality, so that people can easily search and browse your blog.

Writing on LinkedIn

To post your blog on LinkedIn, log in to your account and hit the ‘write an article’ button in the status update box. This will take you to a simple WordPress-style interface, where you can:

  • Upload a header image
  • Insert a title for your article
  • Add formatted text, including bullet points and sub-headers
  • Add rich media, such as images, videos and links

You can publish your article by hitting the ‘publish’ button in the top right, or you can close the browser window and come back to it later – it will auto-save.

When you publish your article, you’ll be asked to add a status update so that you share the link from your profile. Add a comment about your article and hit ‘publish’. You’ve just posted your first article on LinkedIn!

If you look in your browser’s address bar, you’ll see you’ve got a unique URL for that LinkedIn article, so copy it and share it with your networks.

By the way, here’s a really good article about writing on LinkedIn. A lot of it applies to blogging in general. Have fun, and let me know if you found this useful.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

LinkedIn 3×3: Three really good things about LinkedIn

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Last month I presented at the CASE Social Media and Community Conference, an excellent two-day event for higher education mar-comms and alumni relations professionals to meet up and exchange ideas.

Alongside LinkedIn’s Higher Education Partner Charles Hardy, I spoke about our use of LinkedIn for brand awareness, business engagement and alumni engagement. You can see the full presentation here (make sure you click on the ‘notes’ tab so you can read my script).

The last part of the presentation looked at three groups of things: three good things LinkedIn does, three things which could be better, and three things universities could do differently on LinkedIn.

I’m going to expand on those thoughts in a series of posts (three, obviously), starting with three really good things.

The data is mind-boggling

LinkedIn has a lot of data on its users. Think about it: they know who you are, what your profession is and where you work. But they also know what skills you say you have, and what skills other people agree you have.

And, with the introduction of status updates and articles, they know what you write about.

The analytics are pretty good on LinkedIn pages. Free targeted posts are nice. Advertising can be very precise, and you can reach some very niche professional audiences.

And the alumni tool is still amazing.

For a university, the primary audience on LinkedIn is alumni. Businesses and employers are a secondary audience. LinkedIn’s data can be put to use for effective alumni engagement.

We know that alumni are a very diverse group of individuals. They don’t necessarily identify themselves as ‘Hallam Alumni’. They may think of themselves as ‘an art graduate’ or a ‘Sheffield Business School alumni’.

If we sift through the data, we could take a more targeted, personalised approach to alumni engagement. Of course, we’d need more resources to do that.

A snapshot of Sheffield Hallam alumni

A snapshot of Sheffield Hallam alumni

But the data is incredible. We have over 100,000 alumni connected to our page. We can see that the majority of them are UK-based. There are a lot of business and management graduates, and a lot of them are in business development, engineering and IT.

The data also suggests a gap: only 420 are listed as employed by the NHS. We train hundreds of radiotherapy, nursing and midwifery students every year. So we have to assume those alumni are not using LinkedIn, which means we can’t reach them through LinkedIn.

The learning portal is incredible

This is, without a doubt, the single best feature on any social media platform. Really. Facebook has Words With Friends, Twitter has the ever-evolving meta-game that is Twitter, and pretty much every social channel has stories, live video and stickers.

LinkedIn has learning and development, and lots of it.

If you haven't used the portal yet, dive in.

If you haven’t used the portal yet, dive in.

OK, so it’s essentially Lynda.com repackaged, and you need a Premium account, but it’s perfectly integrated, has a personalised interface, and it’s a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to add some new skills to their profile.

LinkedIn is clear on its mission to be the platform for learning and development, and the learning portal really sets them apart. I’m looking forward to seeing what Charles and his team do with it in the future.

You can post news on LinkedIn

You can post news on Facebook and Instagram, if you present it in the right way (I’m looking at you, Buzzfeed). And you can do big announcements on Twitter, if you can tell the story in one tweet.

But news shouldn’t be 100% of your content mix on those channels. You’ll alienate people and they’ll stop listening.

On LinkedIn, news, announcements and future developments make for good content that gets a lot of organic reach, along with plenty of likes and comments from alumni.

People like that type of content on that specific platform.

Look at that organic reach. Now imagine posting that story on a Facebook page.

Look at that organic reach, and those likes. Now imagine posting that story, in that format, on a university Facebook page.

Again, you should mix it up, seeking engagement rather than reach by posting softer, more conversational content – I’ve written before about the power of nostalgia on LinkedIn, for example. But, in general, audiences on LinkedIn like news.

Those are three things I like about LinkedIn. I’ll follow up next week with three… less good things.

What about you? What sets LinkedIn apart for you? How do you use it? What’s different to how you used to use LinkedIn?

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

 

Five things I learned from the #DebateAutism Twitter chat

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What’s the point of a Twitter chat? For social media and marketing professionals, Twitter chats are a regular thing. They’re a good way for professionals to network, make new connections and learn from each other.

I’ve been kicking the idea of a regular Hallam Twitter chat around for a while, but it’s only recently that the pieces have started to fit together.

Here’s one piece: we’ve got a new university-wide strategy. It focuses on changing lives. We change lives, through educational development and self-improvement. Our academics are experts in their field, and their research addresses some of the toughest issues society faces.

Professor Nick Hodge and his dog Huck

Professor Nick Hodge and his dog Huck

For a university, a Twitter chat can be a way to engage large numbers of people in serious debate and inform our research and teaching. It can also be a way to raise our academics’ profiles, and connect them to people who are interested in, and invested in, their specialist subjects.

Our first academic Twitter chat took place on 21 March 2017. It was led by Professor Nick Hodge, an expert in autism who’s very good at using Twitter to develop his professional network and share ideas around autism. Nick’s research focuses on issues that affect the education, development and well-being of disabled people and their families.

The initial catalyst for the Twitter chat was Nick’s professorial lecture, which sold out very quickly. I was interested in working with Nick to raise the University’s profile among autism academics, practitioners and autistic people (and their families), by engaging them in a conversation about perceptions of autism, and the challenges faced by autistic people and their families.

Nick’s inaugural lecture presented us with an opportunity to explore public engagement with a very diverse and interesting community. Opinions and perceptions of autism vary hugely, and practitioners don’t always agree on how autism should be diagnosed and supported.

And Nick’s thought-provoking blurb for his lecture was the starting point for how we framed our Twitter chat:

People think differently about autism.

Some people think that children with autism need to change to be more like people without autism.

Other people think that we should learn to appreciate different types of people.

Sometimes arguments about this can feel like an Autism War.

Disabled people have the right to be who they want to be.

I say this means that we must support people with autism to lead lives that make them happy.

It is our duty to help people with autism to achieve their goals.

There are so many engaging and interesting statements here that I knew it would make for a great Twitter chat subject. The whole concept of a war of ideas around something so emotive and personal as autism seemed rich with potential.

But, of course, there are risks in tackling a subject like autism. We didn’t want to come off as authoritative and prescriptive. We wanted to be inclusive and open to ideas, and we wanted to learn from autistic people’s experiences.

Audiences

By using Nick’s own networks, we engaged academics and practitioners early on, by asking them to supply questions for the chat. We also raised awareness of the chat by promoting it to autism charities and societies.

It was important that we involved autistic people from the start, and one of the first people I contacted was Kashmire Hawker, the disabled students rep for the students union. Kashmire has a strong presence on Twitter, and was keen to be involved. He promoted it among his peers, and he turned out to be a really positive contributor to the chat.

Here are my five tips for running a successful Twitter chat.

Pick a good hashtag

We wanted to stimulate discussion. We also wanted to convey the notion that this was a genuine debate, and not everyone would agree with each other. We settled on #DebateAutism for those reasons. It was Nick’s idea, and it worked.

It also created a bit of a stir, because some people thought we would be debating autism’s existence. We thought that might happen, so there was a little bit of work to do behind the scenes to reassure people that weren’t going down that path.

Get the structure right early on

A Twitter chat is more than just a loose conversation around a broad subject. You need a defined amount of time, and some clear parameters for the chat. We used the idea of an autism war to frame ours.

Have a clear idea of how many questions you’re going to include in the chat. We started with six questions, but realised on the evening that we would have to cut one due to the amount of contributions we were getting. Ten or fifteen minutes per question is about right.

Work with your host

Having Nick on board meant we could reach the right people (people who don’t follow the main Hallam account). He’s very well-respected, and his involvement also gave the whole thing a genuinely academic flavour.

He works closely with autistic people and has a much clearer idea of what the risks are, what wording to use and what issues are likely to be important to people.

Crowdsource the questions

Nick did this early on, messaging his contacts in other universities and organisations, asking for their input. This gave us two things: questions that were relevant to the audience, and an already-invested group of people who wanted to see the outcome of their contribution.

Get a room

No really. Things can move very quickly, and the flow of the chat can easily overtake you if you haven’t got the right things in place.

Book a room with some decent facilities, and space enough for the three or four people that will be facilitating the chat. We had Tweetdeck up on the big screen, with two columns open, tracking chat around the #DebateAutism hashtag.

This meant we could see the general flow of conversation, and zoom in on specific tweets to reply to or retweet them. A colleague spent the whole chat looking after Tweetdeck, retweeting things that stood out as particularly insightful and interesting.

It freed me up to do replies from the University account and advise Nick on his responses. I also had my laptop with me so I could edit the question cards on Photoshop if we decided they needed some last-minute changes.

And being face-to-face with your chat host is a really good idea. You benefit from being able to talk things over before you respond online.

#DebateAutism

So far, there have been a total of 997 tweets which contain the #DebateAutism hashtag. We also saw a huge increase in the number of impressions, replies, retweets and likes our own tweets had on the day of the chat, and the day after.

Nick also saw some changes. In March, he gained 97 new followers, had 105,000 tweet impressions (a rise of 945.3% from February), an increase of  606.8% in profile visits, and an increase of 694.6% in mentions.

And people are still using the tag, and responding to our original questions, weeks after the Twitter chat. #DebateAutism as a conversation topic has plenty of potential to just be a thing in its own right now, long after our initial Twitter chat.

Would we run it again? Yes, we would. Although a lot of planning and preparation went into the chat, it’s had an effect on those who took part, and it’s still resonating with the audience.

I’ll leave the last word to Professor Nick Hodge.

He says: “I was out of my comfort zone going into the Twitter chat, as I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t anticipate the level and quality of support that you would provide for the event, and I imagined that I would need to sort it out myself.

“So the actual experience of hosting a Twitter chat was very different from how I imagined. I felt extremely well-supported and informed, and I was very impressed with the high standard of presentation and professionalism that you brought to the chat event.  It was an incredibly exciting, fast and furious hour that has been really positively responded to and evaluated by my Twitter community.

“This will make a valuable contribution to any autism impact case study for REF 2020.  Before the event I was feeling the onset of Twitter burnout, and I’d decreased my engagement with social media. This event re-energised my interest – it reminded me of the potential of Twitter to reach people and effect change.”

To discuss organising a Twitter chat at Hallam, drop me a line or Tweet me.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Goodbye golden hour, hello Golden Dragon

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When I first starting working in communications in 2005, crisis communications plans looked very different to how they look today.

For a start, there was a big focus on media relations, and how they could help you get your messages across – through interviews, regular statements, etc.

And, of course, we had the magical ‘golden hour’. The golden hour was essentially the time that you had from the start of a crisis unfolding to formulate and agree your handling plan, before people started to make their own assumptions about what was happening, or you were lambasted for not saying or doing anything.

one hour

Fast forward to 2017, and not only do I feel much older than I did in 2005, but those crisis communications plans look pretty different too. And, while the media still play an important role in a crisis, that golden hour has pretty much disappeared.

These days, with so many people plugged into social media day and night, often the first way an organisation finds out that a crisis or issue is brewing is through Twitter or Facebook (incidentally, this is one of the main reasons why I think organisations should hand overall responsibility for social media to their communications practitioners, but there’s probably another blog in that).

Last month, at about 6.30pm one Friday evening (it’s always a Friday), we started to see some direct messages and mentions on the @sheffhallamuni Twitter account, complaining that adverts for a postgraduate open day featuring both Sheffield Hallam and the University of Sheffield were appearing on the Breitbart website. If you don’t know Breitbart, it’s a fairly ‘extreme’ news website – and I use the term ‘news’ very loosely indeed. In fact, much of its content is just plain offensive.

Both us and the small team running the @sheffielduni account moved quickly to agree a joint handling line that we could use on Twitter as a statement and in replies to specific mentions or questions. We did this simply by DMing each other straight away (I was getting a takeaway at the time. In 2005 it’s unlikely I would have been able to deal with an unfolding incident from the reception area of the Golden Dragon).

Twitter crisis1

As we posted replies, explaining that we’d be contacting our advertising partner to ensure they updated their list of websites to ban, the advertiser very helpfully stepped in to say they had removed Breitbart immediately from their list (once again, there’s probably another blog post on the perils of programmatic advertising, but that’s for another day – and in fact, Damian Tambini from LSE has already done so far more articulately than I ever could as part of a research project into how advertising is fuelling fake news).

This also prompted some positive responses from some of the people who had initially made their feelings heard.

Twitter crisis3

Now, while this wasn’t necessarily a major crisis, it had the potential to create some uncomfortable reputational damage if we had failed to act quickly. The lessons here are pretty clear: try and set up a system in which you have people in place to check social media out of hours; and it helps to have a good working relationship with partner organisations’ comms teams – it’s likely you’ll need to work with them at some point.

Spring roll anyone?

Ally Mogg, head of news and PR
@allymogg

World Cancer Day 2017

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Awareness days – there are a lot of them. Some of them are just silly (World Emoji Day?) but there are a few awareness days that do a great job of uniting organisations and people, raising awareness of serious issues.

Saturday 4 February 2017 was World Cancer Day – a global awareness-raising event created by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). Its aim is to encourage fundraising by raising awareness of cancer and the issues people face in fighting it.

Having a huge health and social care provision, we wanted to be part of the conversation, so we turned to our excellent radiotherapy and oncology teaching team. Students from our radiotherapy and oncology courses do their placements in treatment units, and they have lots of face-to-face contact with cancer patients throughout their placements, so we knew they’d have some good stories to tell.

I worked with senior PR officer Sarah Duce on planning our #WorldCancerDay campaign. Sarah manages the faculty’s PR account, and has excellent links in faculty. Jo McNamara, senior lecturer in radiotherapy put us in touch with some brilliant students, and Sarah and I filmed a series of talking heads with Jo and her students.

We didn’t ask them to talk about the course, the facilities, or life as a Hallam student. Instead, we asked them about the impact they’d had on patients’ lives, the challenges they faced, and the reason they’d chosen a career helping people with cancer.

In their responses, the students were incredibly generous with their honesty and warmth. The resulting videos were a great way for us to show our our support on World Cancer Day.

We had some great engagement with the videos (over 700 individual engagements – clicks, likes, shares and replies – on Twitter, and 2,500 engagements on Facebook). They had 32,000 organic impressions – deliveries to a Twitter timeline – on Twitter, and generated an organic reach of 38,000 on Facebook. There were also some really nice comments.

FB_comment

Comments like Judy’s are gold-dust for a university’s social media presence. We can talk about league tables, cutting-edge facilities and outstanding teaching and learning, but Judy’s comment is about the real-world impact that our students have. They work with real people, making a difference wherever they can. And they care.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Why you should stop posting your content and start posting theirs

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Facebook, eh. People keep saying it’s had its time, but it’s still the largest social media platform, with almost 1.8 billion monthly active users, and a huge growth in advertising revenue.

It’s the living room of social media platforms. You use Facebook to chat to friends and family, organise your social life and hang out with people who share your interests.

For organisations, it’s a tricky one to get right. If all you do is play the success trumpet and shout at people about things you think they should do, you risk alienating your audience.

As a result, you fall foul of the algorithm. And that’s a Bad Thing®.

The annoyance factor is real

The annoyance factor is real

I’m working on our Facebook strategy right now. The first draft is almost finished, and I’m at a stage where we need to determine the content mix that’s right for our audiences.

It’s clear – based on things we’ve done that have worked*, and things that other organisations do that work well – that user-generated content needs to be a big part of that mix.

*how about a nice example? Here you go.

Back in the summer, I met with two colleagues: one an academic from the University’s events management course, the other a representative from our ace schools and colleges liaison team.

We talked about school proms: something I know absolutely nothing about, but that the students and staff from the events management team do. With the help of our schools and colleges team, they were helping pupils from seven local schools plan their proms.

It’s a lovely project, involving real people and communities. We knew that the pupils, parents and teachers from those schools had a lot of pride in their school communities, and that we could use our social media presence to mobilise those communities.

So we discussed ways of using social media to engage those audiences.

There was one objective: develop brand affinity with the University. Our goals on social media were around engagement and positive perception. We wanted to get lots of likes, comments and shares, and hopefully some positive mentions.

We asked the pupils from each school to make a video about why they should win a package of support worth £5,000 from our events management staff and students, helping to make their prom an unforgettable experience.

We posted the resulting videos on our Facebook page over the course of a week, with a call to action for our fans to like, comment and share to show their support for their school. We asked the schools to share the posts, mobilising their own community.

The resulting videos generated loads of engagement and reach, without a need to boost posts, by mobilising a highly-engaged audience with a very simple call-to-action.

This one, by the pupils at Dronfield Henry Fanshawe School, generated 2,650 reactions, comments and shares, and reached nearly 70,000 people. That’s organic reach.

Silverdale School’s video reached 41,757 people, generating 1,600 reactions, comments and shares.

In total, we reached 186,188 Facebook users who were not fans of the Sheffield Hallam page. That’s a lot for an organic campaign, and the stats show that the social media activity directly supports our business objective of developing brand affinity with the University among a key target audience.

We were looking for examples of positive perception as well, and a few people left nice comments about our work with the schools.

“So lucky to have this opportunity. Thank you Sheffield Hallam. Please like and share!!”

“A local school working with a local university a perfect combination.”

So user-generated content works well on Facebook. No great revelation, but it’s nice to have the evidence.

Plenty of universities are already onto this, of course. I took to Twitter to find some examples, and the excellent Matt Horne pointed me to Newcastle University’s Facebook page, where they regularly post photos and videos taken on campus by their students.

And, as you’d expect, US universities are very good at making entire campaigns around student content.

So, we’ll be doing more of it on Facebook. It has the potential to support our business objectives, and it’s in the strategy. We’ll also be measuring its performance, and when it generates engagement and reach, we’ll ask ourselves why.

But, as always, don’t let the cart lead the horse. User-generated content isn’t a silver bullet, and it shouldn’t be the only type of content university posts. But it’s a key part of the mix.

Got an example of user-generated content done well? Ping it my way – here, on LinkedIn, or on Twitter.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Chris Husbands: Why I both love and hate Twitter

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It began – as some good, and many bad ideas do – over dinner with a couple of friends in 2011, one a national policy-maker (@johndunford), one a leadership development consultant (@LshipMatters). They persuaded me to sign up to Twitter, and, five years on, I have accumulated over 10,000 followers.

Twitter is equally seductive and maddening. There is always another tweet to check, and I’ve reached the conclusion that some people seem to spend all day locked to their smartphones twittering.

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It is always frustrating: if you are an academic, communicating anything in 140 characters is a real challenge, and the danger is that you say things you don’t quite mean – even if you manage to avoid the elephant trap of typing errors, spotting, yes, just a split second too late that you have missed out a crucial letter. Some words are best avoided altogether, given the potential for a single letter slip to lead you into embarrassment.

And yet: I stay there. Partly, my Twitter presence is an aspect of institutional marketing and communications: I will always tweet, retweet or celebrate institutional achievements, and I take every opportunity to project the University. My handle is @Hallam_VC after all.

Secondly, I do find things out on Twitter – I pick up links to reports and papers I would not otherwise come across. My routine is to quickly save things to an Evernote archive, which I have lightly indexed around a series of tags to help me find things later, and I will read them on trains or early in the morning.

This is perhaps the most useful aspect of Twitter – access to things I would not typically or routinely come across.

And I do engage in debate – although less so than I used to. I don’t like to see ideas which are ill-informed or misdirected go unchallenged. But this is, really, a mug’s game: I’ve learnt from Twitter that any idea, no matter how sensible and evidentially grounded, will attract the snorting derision of someone – and you can be pretty rude in 140 characters (you can be very rude in about eight characters, actually).

Don't feed the trolls.

Don’t feed the trolls.

I’ve learnt that no-one really believes that your opinions are your own – they are always traceable back to your role or your job, and I take ever more care about what I say. No Twitter argument is ever really settled, though some tweeters seem determined to simply grind their opponents into submission. I utterly despise the overt bullying, aggression and unpleasantness which it has legitimated amongst too many individuals and groups.

Twitter has its uses, but it is a dreadful time waster and an excuse for lazy or slovenly thinking; and I write that, and then I’ll find a link to a report which forces me to think hard about something I thought I knew well, and I will be engaged again.

My advice? Like any tool, make it work for you, and don’t let it use you. And don’t get hooked.

Professor Chris Husbands, Vice-Chancellor
@Hallam_VC

Six principles of doing video better

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There’s been a massive growth in online video consumption in the last two or three years. According to the latest stats, half of us are regularly watching video on mobile devices.

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And the trend is set to continue. No big surprises, then.

But the definition of video is changing: we watch video on a plethora of platforms, in a number of different formats.

We watch disposable 15-second clips, filmed in portrait and covered in scribbles and doodles, on Snapchat and Instagram. We watch two-minute semi-professional instructional videos, product reviews and comedy skits on YouTube. And we watch live streams on Facebook and Periscope.

Video has grown sideways as well as upwards.

This trend brings a problem for the content producers: saturation. As organisations cotton on to this trend, they shift their focus to producing video content, and social media users become overloaded, swiping and scrolling past your carefully-crafted video.

So there’s a need to adapt. These are some of things I’ve been doing to adapt. You might find them useful too.

My six principles of doing video better

  1. Make shorter videos. Vine may be dead, but short viewing times are here to stay. They say a photograph should say one thing – it should have one idea to communicate. Video needs to be the same.
  2. Subtitles. People are watching with the sound down, so bite the bullet and sub your videos if they’re for social channels.
  3. Make it about people. If you can, make it about your audience. Who are they? What do they want? Tell them a story that answers those questions, and I guarantee they’ll engage with it. This graduation video is an example of it working for us.
  4. Do less, but better. Stop posting badly-edited, shaky smartphone videos, and invest in a decent bit of kit. Even a basic camcorder on a tripod will get you better results. Look at how the most popular YouTube vloggers do it.
  5. Make paid-for promotion a part of your strategy. If your videos have a call-to-action, or you’re trying to achieve huge online consumption of your content, stump up for a bit of advertising. You don’t need a huge budget to reach new people on social, but you do need a budget.
  6. Make it for the platform it’s being distributed on. Someone looking for pretty things on Instagram wants a very different experience to someone searching and browsing YouTube.

These are principles I’ve adopted over the last few weeks, and they’re working for our social channels. During graduation fortnight we posted eight graduation-themed videos on our Facebook page, including a live broadcast from Sheffield City Hall.

Those videos generated a combined organic reach of 185,000 over two weeks, and a couple of the posts generated a ton of comments from users who wanted to share their own pride in being a Sheffield Hallam student, graduand or alumnus.

We did OK for likes, comments and shares on Twitter too.

Lastly, it’s important, as always, not to get too dazzled by the technology. As communicators, we’re sometimes driven by output, and there’s always a danger of us falling into the ‘we need a *insert output*’ trap.

So start with the goal, then move onto the audience, platform and output. Keep asking why. If you’re sure video is the right medium for the story, you’ll get a lot more out of it if you plan the video. You don’t need to storyboard it, but you should definitely think about these things:

  • Concept – what’s your ‘elevator pitch’ for the video?
  • Narrative – how is the story told? Down-the-line, over-the-shoulder, voiceover?
  • Locations – what do you know about your locations? They bring with them a whole range of challenges.
  • Pace – how many shots will you need in the edit? How fast do things move?
  • Technology – what kit do you need to make it happen?

I hope that gives you some food for thought. I’m always keen to hear how people approach video, so let me know your own tips for creating engaging video content – in the comments, or over on Twitter.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

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