Social Media in Alumni Relations
Social media is great, but without understanding how your audiences now consume content, and what content to share, it’s relatively useless.
In the presentation below, we discuss best practices and what colleges are getting it right. Fair warning, it’s mostly pictures, which won’t give you a lot of context. For that, we give you some of the key take-a-ways.
You Can’t Control Consumption
Your audience is now king, and they now control how and where they read what you produce. In the past, they largely consumed stories on websites. Then, they migrated to social media. Now, they use content aggregators like Flipboard. You can’t control where they read or view your content, which means you should…
Keep Your Channels to a Minimum
Sure, every University has a multitude of silos, and maybe they deserve their own twitter account, but who is going to manage them? If the accounts outweigh the resources, it is time to scale back and keep focus. Steal (ok, borrow) good content from the silos and push it through a minimal amount of very focused and relevant social channels. Alumni and prospective students don’t know who is responsible for the stories, pictures, and videos, and truthfully, they don’t care. They just want good stuff to read or view.
Please Don’t Build Your Own Social Network
We’d all love to have our own heard of devoted fans that we can shephard within our own proprietary social network. Unfortunately, our fans are consuming our content outside of our own websites and Facebook pages. Plus, the sheer effort it takes to manage a singular social channel is hard enough, let alone trying to produce new content and manage the community that is responding to those stories.
Bottom Line
Don’t out-think the channels. If social networks outnumber the resources alloted to manage them, that’s a tell-tale sign of trouble. Just manage the stories your university produces, and push them across an appropriate number of channels. Your audiences are becoming less concerened with where and who the stories are coming from, and more concerned with their quality and availability. If good stories abound, they will be found.