Category: Instagram

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

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

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

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

 

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