The Stretchable Social Media Professional

There’s an irony to life as a social media professional which is...

 You can ALWAYS do better.

By this, I mean the posts you share can always get more clickthroughs, your tweets can always get more engagement, and your videos can always get more views.

This elemental truth has been on my mind in the wake of the previous two months. These periods—October and November—yielded my highest alumni engagement ever. Before this, I had averaged 5K+ alumni interactions on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook each month in my role as a social media strategist for the Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Office. But during the last two months, I saw a significant increase in this area. This was due, in large part, to a few successful polls I ran on Instagram and some additional outreach I did on Twitter and Instagram. 

But, still, these outcomes could be better.

I could be better. 

So, I’ve been testing out a few new things recently. One of which is pretty basic, the other is much more nuanced and involves my colleagues in several different departments.

Awesomely Terrible

My first Instagram story last year was both awesome and terrible. It was awesome because it generated 350 clickthroughs (a great number for me), but it was terrible because it set my expectations way too high. I assumed that each subsequent post would perform in kind. So, when my next few reaped a paltry amount of clickthroughs, I was pretty disappointed. This led to weeks (okay, months) of research and testing. 

I tried video.

I tried quotes.

I tried video AND quotes.

Nothing worked until last month.

Using my blur photo app, I shared the following and, while I fell short of 300 clickthroughs, I did see a 50% increase in this area over previous posts.

I repeated this with other content and experienced similar results. 

I’m not sure why this worked, my colleague said it was “total clickbait” which I totally agree with. But sometimes you just need to go in a different direction.

And it’s okay when things are awesomely terrible in the beginning.

Pay to Play?

I knew it would happen eventually. That, at some point, I would have to dive headfirst into paid social media promotion. I hadn’t exactly resisted this, I just didn’t think it was necessary. Each year, we registered a 10K or more increase in alumni engagement and our annual clickthrough rate rose each year. Also, it would be a challenging to run analysis on paid posts beyond things like web visits, likes, retweets, etc.

But...

When my colleague approached my boss and I about running some paid promotions on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn it sounded like a good idea.

So, over the past few months I’ve spent A LOT of time on the ad manager’s for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It’s been an interesting experience learning the nuances of each and how they measure analytics differently. I’m also getting a sense of deja vu since our first article post, which we put a small amount of money towards, generated more than 1,500 clickthroughs.

It’s also been interesting to see how this first article performed across different platforms (see below).

 Facebook: 1,515 clickthroughs, 187 likes, 2 comments, and 52 shares

 Twitter: 10 clickthroughs, 3 likes

 LinkedIn: 20 clickthroughs

I’m still grappling a bit with how to measure this work from an alumni engagement perspective. We do plan to do some email matching when we launch campaigns, but there’s no guarantee that it’s alumni who are interacting with this content. 

But one thing I WILL be able to do is take a promoted tweet and see if the individuals who commented on it, liked it, or retweeted it are, in fact alumni. Here’s an example from some outreach we did for our Reflective Leader program. 

Of the eight tweeters who liked this post, six of them were HBS alumni. So, while this is a small number I will be able to, in the future, report not only on clickthrough rate but the actual alumni who interacted with our content. This may take us one step closer to establishing a causal relationship between promoted content and target audience engagement.

These have been just two examples of how I’ve tried to stretch myself on social media and I’d love to hear—in the comments section below—how you’ve done the same thing in your work.

Was this post helpful? Was there anything that I missed? Please leave any feedback you have in the comments section below.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS.

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