Social strategy in four (easy?) steps

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LONG POST ALERT!

TL;DR: Writing strategies for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Long process, loads to do, need help. Watch this space.

I’m currently leading on a very exciting piece of work: a set of platform-specific social media strategies for the University’s corporate social channels.

Until now, I’ve argued that we don’t need a social media strategy – we have a communications strategy which directs our approach to all of our comms, and social media is a set of tools we use as part of that.

That’s still true. We don’t need an over-arching social media strategy. But we do need to know exactly what we use Facebook for, what we use Twitter for and what we use Instagram for.

We’ve come a long way over the last year, developing more collaborative approaches to social media, opening corporate channels up to student takeovers and becoming much more serious about our approach to content planning.

So it’s an opportunity to take things to the next level.

Taking things to the next level

Taking things to the next level – there will be challenges and pitfalls, and an enormous monkey

The starting point for these platform-specific strategies is identify the priority platforms. I’m looking at Facebook first – because it’s just huge, with 1.7bn monthly users – followed by Twitter, then Instagram.

In fact, let’s call those platforms The Big Three.

Why are they a priority? Because a lot of what we do on social media is about recruitment and retention of students, and those channels tend to be where most of our engagement happens with that target audience.

Added to those three, Snapchat and Yik Yak are lurking in the background. We were late to the party with Snapchat, so our network is less developed than it is on The Big Three. That doesn’t mean those platforms are out of scope, it just means I’ll get to them when they emerge as priorities.

Additionally, I’m doing a similar piece of work for our LinkedIn presence. It’s a very different platform to The Big Three, so is completely separate to this work.

Of course, there’s a process to follow here. Although there’s knowledge and expertise in our marketing and communications teams, much of what we do is instinctive. So we’re starting from scratch.

Step one

Step one is putting the team together. Initially, we have representatives from across our mar-comms teams, from content specialists to internal comms experts. That group might expand, and we might break into smaller groups for specific pieces of work.

Step two

The next step is to establish some goals. This bit is essential for an effective strategy. We’re looking at business objectives first (get people to an open day), then aligning them to goals we can achieve with social media (track clicks, measure conversions).

Basic stuff, but without it we’re jumping straight into tactical stuff.

It’s very easy to get sidetracked during this step, as we either get lost in the possibilities, or we get dazzled by shiny things. When this happens, it’s important to ask ‘why’.

“What’s our objective?”

“We could do with a social media account for X audience.”

“But why?”

“So that we can achieve Y.”

Bingo. That’s a goal. Everything leading up to it is tactical, and can be shelved for now.

Step three

The next thing to do is an audit of existing channels. Specifically, what we’re doing with the corporate Facebook page. With the main Twitter account. With our Instagram account.

How do we use Messenger? What are we doing with check-ins? Reviews?

What works well as an organic post to our timeline? What generates engagement? What works well as an advert?

Who’s doing it well, or better than us? What works well for them? What are they doing that we’re not?

A lot of this is about the technology. How are we using it? And what does that say about us?

What does our use of social media say about the culture of the University?

This is a huge piece of work, and needs to be focused on each channel separately. The aim here is to look at functionality, audience and competitors. Top level stats like the size of the network are less relevant right now (unless ‘to grow a bigger audience on X channel’ has emerged as a goal).

What’s clear from this step of the process is that knowing your audience is essential. And that knowledge needs to be qualitative, as well as data-driven.

Step four

Finally, once we’ve established the goals, done the audit and audience research, we’ll be ready to work out what content we need for each platform. That’s when we’ll have a strategy.

There’s a mix of content to be determined. ‘Shouting about’ things and endless promotion switches audiences off, so we’ll need to be conversational and human.

The annoyance factor is real

The annoyance factor is real

We do need to promote things and raise awareness of stuff, but we need to do it in the right way, and at the right times.

Our content needs to be tailored to each channel. The days of ‘have you put it on social media?’ are over.

Audiences choose their platforms because they want to experience that platform. If we want to engage an audience on Instagram, we need to make a thing for Instagram. And knowing that audience, what they want from a platform, and what they’re OK with from us, is fundamental.

Your audience: who are they and what do they want?

This is such a big piece of work (really it’s three pieces of work) that I expect it will take two or three months to ‘complete’. And, even then, it will never really be finished. We’ll need to review and adjust regularly, depending on what happens to each platform.

I’ll post more about our strategies for our social platforms as the work develops. It’s still very early. If you’ve got questions, or you’d like to know more about the process, drop me a line or a tweet and I’ll tell you what I can.

And if you’ve got experience of writing a social media strategy, let me know in the comments, or on Twitter. I’d love to hear from you.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

#SHUinsiders – the pilot year

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Back in summer 2015 we created the first Insider’s Guide to Sheffield Hallam – an all-encompassing manual to the University and the city, predominately aimed at new undergraduates. The guide featured students who shared their views on the whole Sheffield Hallam experience, and they were christened the SHUinsiders.

Exploring the scope for the Insiders
As a member of the Student Experience marketing team, I was keen to explore using SHUinsiders to facilitate digital student-student communications with the primary aims of

  • enhancing students’ experiences of the University and the city by demonstrating student life (with a secondary aim of supporting recruitment)
  • developing a sense of belonging, community and brand affinity amongst the student population

Going social and working with Joe
In light of the University website redevelopment being underway, we were limited in terms of the presence we could create for the Insiders on the Sheffield Hallam website. So we decided that using social media was a logical way forward, allowing the students to post regular updates as and when they had information to share. The team and I then met with social media manager Joe Field to discuss how we could make this happen, and the #SHUinsiders project was born.

From here, Joe and I took leadership of the project and progressed it through its next stages.

Finding our stars
Over the course of the academic year, eight students worked as #SHUinsiders after being identified through various channels including a workshop, advertising via the Careers Hub, SHU GoGlobal activities, and other social media activity undertaken for the University’s Clearing campaign. The following three are being taken through to 2016/17.

Clarissa Alford, second year history student in 2015/16
Clarissa Allford is our original insider who I met at the Insider’s Guide student workshop. Her infectious enthusiasm about Sheffield Hallam and her positive and likeable character made her an obvious choice. Her interests include vintage, vinyl and music and she truly believes in making the most of the student experience.

Lawrence Penn, first year geography student in 2015/16
Lawrence responded to a job advertisement, and was selected due to his range of hobbies and interests which include cycling, the Peak District and the great outdoors, performing and media. He’s also a huge advocate for the Students’ Union.

Yuvini Hettiarachchi, marketing communications and advertising placement year student in 2015/16
Sri Lankan student Yuvini was identified by colleagues in International Student Support due to her great work on SHU GoGlobal-related activities. She brought an international perspective to the team and was excellent at finding and sharing on-campus opportunities.

Our other enthusiastic Insiders were Katie Blaylock, Gabriel Chiew, Jamilya Ashyrbaeva, John Rowbotham and Abbie Gregory.

Find out more about this year’s Insiders on their new blog site.

How the project worked
During this first year, the Insider’s hints, tips and experiences of student life were predominantly shared via their Twitter feeds, and sometimes through Facebook and Instagram. The best Tweets were shared by Joe via the corporate channel to facilitate greater exposure.

Content was predominantly student-led, and we relied on the students to share information, opportunities and events via their social media accounts, focusing on anything which might improve the student experience for their peers.

I also suggested other ideas for content through a private Facebook group (a method of communication suggested by the Insiders themselves at a gathering we had at Tamper Coffee). This included events we wanted them to get more involved in such as Varsity and Outlines where we offered extra incentives such as free tickets. And various promotional opportunities such as the SHUcard £1 Wednesday offer. Plus anything else, either on or off-campus, which ultimately had a positive impact on the student experience.

In addition, we asked them to get involved in mini projects led by Joe – such as Periscope broadcasts at the opening of Coffee Union at the Students’ Union and the Christmas Fayre in Hallam Hall.

Highlights of the academic year
Instagram

The #SHUinsiders week-long takeover on the corporate Instagram account was a great success and certainly one of the highlights of the year, as encompassed in Joe Field’s blog post. In fact it was the most engaged with moment on the account, with 1,630 likes and 50 comments.

At the end of the academic year, #SHUinsiders was the second most engaged with hashtag on the account with 852 interactions. Only #sheffield beat it with 1,014, with #wearehallam in third place at 584.

Facebook
As of 31 May, the highest performing post on the Hallam Facebook account was Insider Katie Blaylock’s ‘day in the life’ story with 63 likes. Katie wrote a diary-entry style account of a typical day in her shoes accompanied by her own photos, and this clearly resonated with our audience.

Twitter
We saw a very high level of #SHUinsiders activity on Twitter over the academic year, with 432 mentions of the hashtag up till 31 May 2016. Twitter proved to be a quick and simple platform from which the Insiders could broadcast, and an effective way for Joe to share their content via the corporate account.

What we learned
In a nutshell…

  • this type of student-generated content increases interaction and engagement with all our channels
  • the Insiders are helping to create the sense of community we were aiming for
  • they’re also successfully promoting the Hallam experience and student life in Sheffield
  • Twitter has been an effective platform from which to generate ‘live’ posts and share quick updates

However

  • the Insiders need greater exposure to increase awareness and engagement with their accounts
  • they need dedicated a platform to which we can direct traffic and from where they can blog
  • we need to explore additional platforms more such as Snapchat

The future for the Insiders
For 2016/17, these students have become known as #HallamInsiders with a reduced team of four members. This year, they have been asked to write blog posts on a dedicated area of the Sheffield Hallam blog site, sometimes under pre-determined themes which correlate with the student experience CRM plan (eg reassurance for new students in September/October).

They will also continue to share their experiences, hints and tips by posting regular Tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts etc (sometimes guided by our team). And get involved in more projects with Joe Field and the team using platforms such as Facebook Live and Snapchat.

The Insiders and the #HallamInsiders blog have been promoted in the Insider’s Guide, in kitchen packs sent out to halls of residence, and through the corporate Twitter channel. Joe and I will also look into how we can increase exposure even further, working with other social media account holders such as Sheffield Hallam Students’ Union and faculties to encourage them to share content.

Helen Horton, student experience marketing
@HelenHorton08

 

Clearing 2016 – three ways we used social media to make a difference

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A-level results day. It can be an incredibly stressful time for students and, depending on what happens, it might involve them changing their study plans very quickly.

At Hallam, hundreds of members of staff (and student ambassadors) from across the University worked tirelessly to help those people, recruiting new students to the University through the clearing and confirmation process. Like previous years, Clearing 2016 was a huge team effort, bringing staff from every department together.

Our social media presence has grown significantly over the last few years, and the way we use it during clearing and confirmation has changed. This year, we wanted to do a few things differently.

Firstly, we wanted to tell our clearing story: the range of people involved, the excitement on the day, and our enthusiasm for changing people’s lives.

We also wanted to reply to everyone who took the time to message us about how excited they were to come and study here. No, really. Everyone. Engagement with our new fans and followers was really important, and we wanted to get it right.

Lastly, we wanted to use the technology to add real value to the clearing process at Hallam.

This is how we did it.

Telling our story

Our promotional content focused – as it often does – on our students. We found four students who came to us through clearing, and we created visual content based on their experiences.

Because we wanted to reach new audiences, we did a lot of advertising on Facebook and Instagram with our student stories. We also did some organic posts with them.

This organic post reached over 13,000 people, had over 4,500 video views and got a bit of engagement, with over 150 likes, comments and shares. Our paid-for posts obviously reached many more people – people who fit our target demographics and who didn’t already like our Facebook page.

Engagement

We knew activity on Twitter would peak between 7am and 2pm, based on previous years. We’d get questions, in the form of @s and DMs, and we’d get notifications from people happy they’d secured a place at Hallam.

So we assigned a team member to each stream on Twitter: we had someone looking after notifications, one person looking after DMs, and someone else ready to post relevant, interesting and useful content to our timeline. The system worked well, and it meant we replied to every message.

In total, we sent 190 tweets during Clearing, and 35 DMs. We received 353 mentions, and our tweeting behaviour over the key two days of Clearing was 92 per cent conversations and 8 per cent updates. 72 per cent of our tweets were with new contacts, and 28 per cent were with existing contacts.

To increase engagement further, we set up a Facebook Live broadcast from the clearing suite, featuring one of our ‘faces of clearing’, Ben. This live video reached over 14,000 of our fans, and got shared nearly 30 times.

We used the live stream to answer questions, show the buzz in the clearing suite, and humanise our operation. We did something similar with our Instagram and Snapchat stories, which even featured a surprise appearance from the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Chris Husbands.

Adding value

Our biggest change this year was to open up the application process through Facebook’s Messenger service. On results day, people could begin the application process by sending a direct message to our Facebook page.

Once they’d done so, one of our dedicated Facebook triage team would ask for their qualifications and other details needed to create an application. Or, if they didn’t meet our requirements, they’d sensitively let them know.

It was exactly the same process and conversation that new applicants would experience if they called our clearing hotline and spoke to an adviser. But on a social media platform.

We used Facebook’s functions to enhance and manage the process. We used saved replies for parts of the conversation, and we tracked conversations with the labelling function. We also added a note to each conversation, identifying the status of the application – either ‘application created’, ‘didn’t meet requirements’ or ‘other’.

In total, we put around 20 applicants forward through this process, knowing that if just one of them converted, it would be worth our time and effort.

Overall, this was our biggest social media operation yet, involving two separate teams: one dedicated to engagement and publishing, and one dedicated to facilitating the application process. A whole range of Hallam people took part in our social story-telling: from students to the VC.

As a result our content across social platforms was genuine, engaging – and it was about people.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Thought leadership from the top

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Today Sheffield Hallam’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Chris Husbands, has published a blog on the BERA website about how social media has transformed professional communities.

In his BERA blog, he says that: “Social media has brought together teachers, policy wonks and academics in virtual coalitions. Some say that there has been nothing like it before, though those who do largely overlook the ‘teachers’ centre’ movement of the 1970s and 1980s which also, in admittedly local settings, also brought together like minded teachers who formed networks which brought about change.  But even so the scale here is quite remarkable.”

Prof Husbands is a prolific blogger and tweeter. He writes a weekly blog and uses it as a channel for communicating with staff – it’s a great way to keep in regular contact to discuss topical education issues, celebrate successes, and just tell people what he’s been doing.

Chris_Husbands412

For communications professionals, having a senior leader who sees the potential and the opportunities provided by social media is really valuable. We know that social is here to stay. The channels may change in the future, but digital communication is now embedded in our personal and professional lives.

Chris is a great example of how senior leaders can use social media for communication, engagement in debate, and thought leadership. His recent blog about the Government’s plans for new grammar schools in The Conversation pulled no punches.

His blogs for the Institute of Education where he worked until December 2015, are being compiled and edited into a new book, which will be available on their website soon.

 

Ally Mogg, Head of News and PR

@allymogg

Engagement. How do you do yours?

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The 2016 degree show, in the Sheffield Institute of Arts at the former Head Post Office

Raising awareness and creating conversations is a key central pillar of being able to increase engagement levels with your desired target audience on social media.

The ability to provide an opportunity for people to interact with you, offer their feedback on your ‘product’ (both good and bad), become an engaged advocate and to share this is now readily available through a number of social media products.

The key is choosing the right platform for the audience you want to talk to in order to create the right level of impact.

For final year students who are part of the Sheffield Institute of Arts (SIA), their degree shows are a culmination of three or four years of hard work in order to prepare and display the fruits of their work to friends, family, and industry.

We wanted to give those students the opportunity to share their success – so as to not just confine to the within the walls of our newly renovated Head Post Office, or the Cantor Building.

Taking into account the visual nature of the work produced by our students including fashion, photography, design, we felt Twitter was a great way of communicating this message.

To enhance the Twitter user experience, we were able to call upon the services of two PR and Journalism students – Bonnie Hines and Stefan Meinhardt – who ‘took over’ the @SIAgallery Twitter account during the preview evening.

https://twitter.com/SIAgallery/status/741311387171966976

By going through this route, it also allowed us the opportunity to demonstrate to industry influencers, internal and external stakeholders, as well as current and prospective students the breadth and quality of work on display.

It also gave us the chance to have conversations with our audience – so that it wasn’t just us broadcasting outwards. We involved them.

So, how did it go?

In short, very well. Four hours and exactly 50 tweets later, the tweets had accrued: 14391 impressions, 419 engagements, 29 RT’s and 37 favourites.

By using the SIA Twitter account, it gave us the perfect opportunity to display this. RT’s from other University Twitter accounts proved the perfect advocacy tool too ensuring the tweets were able to reach a significant amount of people – and by going through the SIA account, it meant that it would reach key influencers, leaders and other vital stakeholders.

Utilising two students who were able to upload and send tweets via their own phones meant that they could visit more of the degree show as our students work was on display across a number of university buildings.

By doing this, rather than there being downtime in proceedings during travel between sites, it allowed the number of tweets to continue to be communicated at a regular pace – which is important for keeping your audience interested for longer. As it’s a ‘live’ takeover, the amount of tweets needs to reflect this, which we were able to achieve.

The takeover gives Sheffield Hallam a unique opportunity to harness and utilise the skills of our own students as a peer-to-peer engagement tool, which was a great outcome for those who have an interest in both Sheffield Hallam and SIA.

Lessons learnt?

Being able to draw upon a pool of willing and confident students to host the takeover does prove to be a tricky obstacle at times. This was something which needed staff resource to resolve, which during the summer holidays, bought with a series of challenges – but everything was alright on the night. Agreeing on the need for a takeover soon would help to alleviate this.

Those who host the takeovers are always enthused by the simplicity of how they work. Guidance is always issued, which covers tone, the type of content to tweets, simple dos and don’ts and the fact that a nominated staff member was on hand to monitor the tweets and answer any questions they have, gives those hosting take takeover the ability to use Twitter to its full effect.

A measurement of its effectiveness is the answer to the question; ‘would you do it again?’ and when the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ you know it has been worthwhile.

Aidan Begley, Communications Assistant, Faculty of ACES.

@ACESupdates 

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

Using data to tell a story

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In my last blogpost I looked at ‘peak content’ and shared some tips for creating shareable content for use on social platforms. One of the most popular pieces of content shared on social is infographics. The great thing about them is that they’re an excellent way of using data to tell a story. Newspapers have long been creating them in print to illustrate stories, and the Guardian and the FT both have dedicated data journalists and designers that have created some great infographics in recent years. Done well, they prompt a discussion or conversation (or sometimes an argument).

The Guardian datablog is a good place to start to seek out some nice examples of infographics and data visualisations. It may be a few years old now, but their infographic on Government department spending in 2011 (below) is a fantastic example of what a good infographic should do – using data to tell an interesting story in a visually stimulating way. Yes, it’s busy, there’s a lot of information on there, but for politics nerds and designers it’s quite something.

Government spending 2010-11

However, it’s a bit too detailed for the average social media timeline – too much zooming in and losing your way. But if you have the time to pore over the figures it’s perfect.

An excellent recent example that worked well on social is the one below from National Parks Wales, who used some data about their parks to tell a great story about their impact on people, businesses and on the country. It’s simply done but well executed, and perfect for social. It prompted discussions about the importance of green space on well-being and the impact of global warming.

National Parks Wales

Here at Sheffield Hallam, we commissioned a designer to create an infographic for use both on social and as a handout for some of our regional stakeholders. We wanted it to tell the story of our impact in the city region through supporting jobs and driving economic growth. We posted it on Twitter and LinkedIn, and it was widely shared by our business-engaged audiences. It’s also a useful handout for staff who are working with stakeholders and want to provide them with something which demonstrates our impact.

SHU Value of Sheffield

Commissioning a designer is a good idea, but not everyone can afford that. If you want to try yourself, there are some useful free tools out there. Websites like FlatIcon have lots of useful free icons and images that you can download, and Infogram is a good online tool to help you create something from scratch. There are some good templates in software such as Prezi and even MS Powerpoint. If you do give it a go, have a read of Guardian data journalist George Arnett’s article on some golden rules and things to avoid before you get started.

Ally Mogg, head of news and PR
@allymogg

 

Installation successful

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Last week, our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Chris Husbands, was formally installed in a ceremony at Sheffield Cathedral. There was an audience of more than 300 guests in attendance- a mixture of local bigwigs, staff and students.

Professor Husbands is only the fourth VC we’ve had at Hallam, so these moments of pomp and ceremony are rare, and we wanted to open the installation ceremony up to our whole community.

Aside from the traditional content we knew we’d be putting out, like a press release and a staff news item, we wanted to use social to involve people and make them feel part of the event by giving them front row access.

We decided a livestream would be the best way of doing this, but wanted to take a minimal approach, in terms of kit.

We’d also started to think about our Facebook audience, looking beyond current students (who a lot of our content is pitched at) to other really engaged audiences. We know from looking at our reactions (formerly limited to likes) and comments that Hallam staff are really engaged with our Facebook page.

With Facebook Live now available to all Facebook users (not just celebrities, as was the case when it launched in summer 2015) and offering us greater potential reach than Periscope would, we decided to dip our toe in the water and try out this fledgling technology to broadcast the 30 minute ceremony.

A week before showtime, something happened- well, someone happened, to be precise: Chewbacca Mom.

chewbacca_mom

She blew up the internet and took home the record for the most-watched Facebook Live video ever (currently at 154m views)- as well as notching up TV appearances, college scholarships, a visit to Facebook HQ and more Chewbacca masks than she can shake a stick at.

This left us more psyched than ever to try out Facebook Live for the VC’s installation. This was a technology that people were excited about so there couldn’t have been a better time for us.

On the day, we chose a location for our tripod which would give us a great view of the action, allow us to rig our small mic up to the podium and, importantly, mean others involved in the event wouldn’t be tripping over us.

We quickly gained live viewers, reactions and comments. We peaked at 64 live viewers, with people dipping in and out. One advantage of Facebook Live is that the video stays on your timeline after the live broadcast and can be shared- so we’ve currently had almost 4,200 views of the video. (Fancy boosting that? Check out the video here).

Some other stats, for all the number nerds like me out there:

  • The video post has been shared 19 times on Facebook
  • It’s got a total of 195 reactions, comments and shares
  • Our post has so far reached 12,606 people, which is great reach for organic content

So, not quite a Chewbacca Mom (they’ll be a rare phenomenon), but not too shabby for an iPhone on a tripod in a Cathedral.

My top 3 tips from this experience:

  1. Have a pre-written, pre-agreed (if necessary) description for your video saved on your phone that you can quickly copy and paste across to your Facebook Live post before you start broadcasting; I did this and it really took the pressure out of worrying about typos in the heat of the moment.
  2. Have a second device (another phone or tablet) to hand so you can follow the viewers’ experience, be doubly sure of any moderation requirements and also as backup in case of failure.
  3. Carry out a location visit in advance of your Facebook Live broadcast, so you can check that your data connection or WiFi will cope. WiFi coverage for the bit of the Cathedral I was in wasn’t optimum, but luckily my 4G was up to the job.

VC_install

Have you tried Facebook Live yet or are you considering it? What was your experience? If you haven’t used it yet, what do you think the risks or barriers are? I’m looking forward to using it again in future to engage our staff.

Sara Kouchakji-Allen, head of employee and change communications
@sara_koo

 

 

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

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