Universities & Social Media Growth: Everything (and the Kitchen Sink) That Goes Into Being Successful

Rival IQ’s 2019 Social Media Benchmark report listed higher education as one of the top social media industries across 12 different industries. In terms of engagement rate, higher ed ranked:

• #1 on Instagram
• #2 on Twitter
• T-#3 on Facebook

Here’s a blurb from that report:

Higher Ed Crushes the Competition Again

Higher Ed took the Instagram gold and the Twitter silver, proving that students, alums, and fans are all about the alma mater on social. Like every industry, these colleges and universities are suffering from less engagement on Facebook than last year.

But the importance of social media to higher ed doesn’t end with students, alums, and fans. If you’re a university that’s looking to tap into the international market, social media continues to penetrate beyond domestic borders. According to Hootsuite’s Digital Around The World In 2019 report:

Social media continues to account for the greatest share of … [online] time, and the average user spends more time on social today than they did this time last year. The number of social media users around the world has increased by more than 280 million since January 2018 ….

With social media proving its importance to higher ed—in terms of domestic engagement and international reach—what must a university do to best optimize and empower its social media?

The honest answer will scare off the weak.

Because the workload and the commitment isn’t for the faint-of-heart.   

The Big (But Successful) Commitment to University Social Media

At the university level, social media encompasses a huge inventory of activities, oversights, and KPIs. When I speak about social media management, I typically identify 4 broad categories: Engagement, Monitoring, Customer Service, and Analytics. However, at the university level, these broad categories can be splintered into 15 specific initiatives:

• Engagement: The most impactful tract at your university, with subsets in Audience Growth, Strategy & Campaigns, and Creatives (including graphic design, video, copywriting, photography, and brand voice (more on this later)).
• Brand Expansion: This can expand or contract depending on where your university’s social media team sits; i.e.,  Marketing or PR. This can also expand or contract depending on the importance and dissemination of your university’s brand guidelines.  
• Brand Oversight: The centralization and oversight of all university branded social media accounts. Without this oversight, your stakeholders will create a proliferation of branded accounts, many of which will be improperly branded, password compromised, and/or poorly updated/maintained (thus risking brand dilution).
• PR and Community Outreach: This is a concerted effort to tether your university to community events, community identity, and local organizations (e.g., news outlets, chambers of commerce, businesses).
• Dissemination: The broad dissemination of important university information, including announcements, alerts, campus events, and responses to external/internal stories.
• Monitoring: The tool-based (e.g., Meltwater) or word-of-mouth oversight of university mentions (good, bad, and benign) within the social media universe. This is also a 24/7 endeavor, which means you must have an awareness (at all times) of the social media universe.
• Crisis Management: A subset of monitoring, but still, it deserves its own category. Social media can either start a crisis (e.g., a university employee posts about a divisive topic), fuel a crisis (e.g., an external event ignites an onslaught of negative comments), or agitate a crisis (e.g., a university’s urge to explain or defend—as opposed to remaining silent—can sometimes be detrimental).  
• Stakeholder Support: These are the dotted lines that connect to your university’s social media hub, everyone from the university president to professors to students to departments, all of whom you intend to highlight, help, and promote.
• Growth and Giving: This is the delicate balance between social media and PR, Marketing, Admissions, and Advancement. Social media is a powerful vehicle for marketing, recruitment, and giving (e.g., Day of Giving campaigns), but all of this must be balanced against the wants and needs of your university’s broad—and easily distracted—social media audience (i.e., students, alumni, fans, etc.).
• Analytics: The tool-based (e.g. Sprout Social) reporting on individual posts and/or campaigns.
• Scheduling and Planning: The tool-based (e.g., Sprout Social) scheduling of daily/weekly/monthly content. It also includes calendar planning (and the scheduling of tie-in posts) around events, holidays, and celebrations.
• Maintenance and Support: This runs the gamut … internal questions about social media, on-going research about social media updates, overseeing outages and glitches, maintaining/protecting your university’s password list, and guiding campus-wide policies and procedures.   
• Student Worker Management: University students can be trusted with a slice of the social media pie (e.g., event coverage, research, creatives). However, oversight is required because a student’s personal social media use doesn’t mirror a university’s planned, protected, and structured social media use.
• Platform Insights and Diversification: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram (and SnapChat if you’re there) share similarities but are also very different. These differences require different sharing strategies. And if you’re managing more than the top-level university accounts (e.g., other accounts such as Alumni, Student Association, Athletics, etc.), then you must understand and target the diverse needs and wants of these various audiences.
• Customer Service: With follow-through, commitment, and compassion, a good university transforms its social media into a customer service platform, a place for prospects, students, parents, and alumni to ask questions and seek support.

University Social Media: You Need An Agile (And Creative) Team  

The laundry list above only scratches the social media surface. Within the aforementioned responsibilities, certain skill sets are needed to successfully build a university’s social media presence. While many skills go into a university’s social media success, these are the 10 most important:

• Writing small and writing for impact: Visuals are important to engagement, but social media copy provides value and context. Social media writing is sometimes called “small writing” or “micro-style.” Whatever you call it, your university’s social media copy must be thoughtful and optimized for engagement. Just because the writing’s “small” doesn’t mean the commitment is small too.
• Agile graphic design: Your university’s social media team might be large enough to house its own graphic designer. Or university marking might have a dotted line into the creation of social media graphics. But if your social media team is small or marketing is overwhelmed, a social media professional must be creative enough to quickly craft his own social media graphics. 
• Taking a decent picture: A university is hyper-dynamic, meaning it’s constantly alive with on-campus events …. events that need to be photographed. While a decent picture can be captured via smartphone, a digital photographer is a must when sharper images are needed.  
• Video filming/editing on the fly: The same as above … a university’s hyper-dynamic nature means there’s a necessity for constant recording, production, and editing. And because your university’s production team has different goals, needs, and time constraints, your social media team must be able to quickly produce raw video and/or re-edit produced video to fit the social media space.
• Crafting a brand voice: A university’s social media professional doubles as the brand voice (i.e., whoever’s managing your social media is also the voice behind your social media). This skill takes real-world practice and thoughtful crafting. Too careful, and your university sounds overly corporate or impersonal. Too loose, and your university risks sounding contrived, unprofessional, and beyond the academic mission.
• Taking a risk to rise above the noise: At the university level, there’s a difference between a social media manager and a social media strategist. The former (in his purest form) is risk averse; he’s more of a social media babysitter, never growing your audience, choosing instead to drown (but still be safe) in the social media noise. On the other hand, a social media strategist welcomes risk and isn’t afraid to take chances (within reason). To rise above the social media noise, to compete in today’s attention economy, your university must employ a professional who’s confident enough to risk, differentiate, and experiment. 
• Compassionate customer service: Not unlike brand voice, social media requires a carefully crafted voice when engaging with university customers (students, alumni, parents, etc.). And when I say “carefully crafted,” I don’t mean artificial. I mean a voice that’s compassionate, patient, and diligent when answering inquiries and complaints.
• Supporting your students: Your university’s social media team must have the patience and understanding to respect and accept student voices. University students use social media to express themselves, voice opinions, and enact change. At times, these voices run perpendicular to a university, but in those times, your social media leadership must adhere to the free speech decree of Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend your right to say it.”
• Having a thick skin: Not everyone’s friendly in social media, and not everyone’s gonna like what your university posts. In fact, some will actively mock your university’s social media. Diligent social media monitoring will capture many of these incidents, and at times, the negativity will take its toll. Because of this, a thick-skinned professional is important to a university’s social media maintenance and growth.
• Having a humble and open mind: Students know a lot about social media, but their social media is on a personal level, which is very different than social media at the university or corporate level. That said, your university’s social media team must be humble enough and open minded enough to tap into the suggestions and skill sets of your student body.

Sorry: University Social Media Isn’t Magic … It’s Hard Work

In some cases, university leadership fools itself into thinking social media is easy. The laundry list above proves otherwise, but some people still think it’s magic. “Create an account,” they say, thinking everyone will simply follow.

It ain’t magic! By working hard and checking the boxes above, the small, private university I work for has grown its social media. Since August 2017, our total social media audience has increased 18%, our message output has increased 96%, our total impressions have surpassed 32 million, and our engagement has increased 109%. This doesn’t include YouTube, which (since April 2018) has increased by 1100 subscribers (+148%) and 130K views (+99%).

Some might call these “vanity metrics,” and for the sake of argument, let's say they do (though I don't agree). I'll counter that these metrics still reflect something of great value; specifically, the value of aggressive and ongoing activity, which can be boiled down to well-planned strategy, constant creating, and a long-term commitment to broad engagement. Another thing to note: these numbers don’t necessarily reflect my university's ongoing commitment to one-on-one conversations, responsive customer service, and alumni/prospective student engagement (i.e., gifts and admissions).

So if you’re gonna take anything away from my advice, it’s this: your university can succeed at social media—benefiting, at the very least, from reach and engagement. However, to succeed, a whole lot of hard work is required. Don’t fool yourself. Hard work is required to domestically and globally expand your university's social media, no different from the hard work that goes into successful Admissions or Advancement or Academics or any other area at your university.