Category: Twitter

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Unless your political views are extreme, or you have outdated social values, your opinions are probably fine to share.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

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

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.

giphy

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.

screen-shot-2016-03-30-at-15-27-57

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

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 

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