Social Media Management
How do you manage your social media strategy?
At this time we do not have a social media strategy. We are in the process of creating one and the information in this training has really helped.
Aliza,
What tools (listening Posts) do you use to curate content to share on your platforms? Do you have any favorites? Do you use any other tools to manage your accounts or to automate posts such as HootSuite, BufferApp, or IFTTT? I'm wondering what your experience is with other third-party apps to help you manage your accounts.
Thanks for sharing with the group.
Robert Starks Jr.
At our school we have 3 leads for our Social Media accounts, one for each Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each have different objectives as I mentioned in another forum.
Twitter is more for marketing
Facebook is for building the community
LinkedIn is more for networking, and helping alumni find employment.
We oversee each others' accounts and provide content for each other if it fits with their objectives more than ours.
It makes for us to stay on the same page without being too redundant for the people who follow us on more than one social media account.
Leticia,
How do you currently define "participation" with career services and how do you currently measure this? These are important questions to answer as they will be vital to determining if any interventions you design (incorporating social tools or not) are working at increasing participation and to what extent. Beyond increasing participation which could be quantified, how might you measure the quality of participation? Does your department currently measure this as well and if so, how?
Robert Starks Jr.
We have two Facebook pages; one for Public Clinic and we recently added the Career Services, I was not familiar on how to effectively use the social media, and I am looking forward to incorporate the knowledge I am receiving from this excellent course to better marketing our services and increasing graduates and students participation.
Tara,
Excellent example! Very strategic on your part to appeal to common interests in your communication strategy and your tactic of tagging this person knowing they'd be notified. Once we find common ground with someone and rapport is established, we typically find that people are much more cooperative, collaborative, and willing to engage in dialogue. It is amazing how subtle this example is yet how powerful it was for you. Thank you for sharing it!
Robert Starks Jr.
Rapport is vital. I don't want someone hound-dogging me with "have-to's" on my personal facebook page , so I refuse to do so on my business page, as well.
It only takes a moment to show personal interest in someone, and then a whole world opens up to a Career Advisor that wouldn't have by just focusing on the "numbers". Balance & caution are warranted, though, as it can get out of hand if not checked.
When I see someone that is an "MIA", especially, post something unrelated to the field of study, I will private message them about their interest. How did they start? What involvement do they have? How does this affect them?
For example, a grad that never completed a survey & wouldn't answer emails, calls, or facebook messages kept posting pics for Pitbull rescue. So I messaged her about it & shared my love of all dogs. I, then, went on Google images & found an adorable pic & posted it to her timeline with her name on it (so she'd be notified). 5 minutes of non-related work got me all the info I needed for placement & the grad the open door to know she can approach me with any career questions!
Tara,
If I were to restate your strategy, it seems you have chosen to use the Facebook platform (likely because of popular use from your grads) for the purpose of building/strengthening relationships which is essential to establishing a working alliance that increases the likelihood of collaboration in their job search as well as their willingness to disclose updates to you. This is a good start. Beyond contacting grads for updates, do you use the tool for building/strengthening rapport? If so, how do you do this and how do you use the information you can gather through social platforms to adjust your communication strategies with your target audience? If you currently don't give consideration to this, how might you in the future?
Robert Starks Jr.
To be honest, my only social strategy up to this point has been to "friend" past grads & new grads upon graduating. Then contact them through this manner for updates to their licensure & placement.
Also, I have "friended" fellow co-workers (which most are alumni) and repost enlightning things that are related to our field of study.
My team and I share our Social Media responsibilities.
We have three team members and at the moment we primarily focus on facebook and twitter.
I have one teammate monitor facebook, and the other monitors twitter.
I instruct what is posted on either site, unless they find something relevant and repost it.
Susan,
What type of accounts do you have on Facebook? Do each of you have profiles and are the accounts in your personal name or your career center? If they are in your personal names, have you considered the sustainability of your strategy? What would happen to the audience (friends) you have built over time if one of you left the company? Would the next person have to start over? If you are using profile accounts, have you considered your long-term strategy? Facebook profile accounts limit you to having 5,000 friends. It may see as if you'll never reach this amount but over the course of years, if you consistently build your Facebook audience, you may reach this limit. What would you do then? If you haven't, you may want to consider one fan page for your Career Center as a means to introduce students to the career center through Facebook and a Career Services profile page to "friend" alumni depending on what your goals are for your accounts. If you create a Facebook Fan Page, think of it as an online, Facebook Career Center. You can create custom tabs to promote any self-help resources such as any job searching tools your school provides or automated resume assistance, events, etc. Here's an example of a career services office that integrates their Twitter and Pinterest using custom tabs: https://www.facebook.com/UWCALSCareers.
Please let me know your thoughts about some of the points I have raised.
Robert Starks Jr.
There is me and another part time person in our Career Services department. We each have our own professional Facebook accounts where we post school/department related material. One of the things I'm learning in this course is how to develop metrics and ways to measure the social media impact. I'm also enjoying the section on Content Creation! Really helpful information.
Our Director manages our one and only social media, facebook. As Director of the Placement Department, I create a fan page with all of my students. This helps to stay connected once they have graduated. We need to develop more social media though.
Robert,
I encourage you to continue your questions, discussions in the Career College Lounge (www.careercollegelounge.com) as this is the place course participants can continue interacting, learning together, and sharing beyond this course. I am in the Career Services Performance Group and post blogs there - I'm also available at all times to answer questions and have this type of great dialogue....so, the learning from one another that can be achieved is completely dependent upon any individual's willingness and/or desire to continue sharing and interacting in this dedicated forum. I look forward to continued interaction and thank you for your contributions to these forums. Every question, comment, shared insight and example helps all of us learn.
Take care!
Robert Starks Jr.
This course and the discussion has really helped me stay focused on a better game plan and objective for my social marketing plan. In spirit of our common interest in this forum, I figured it would be appropriate to share my Twitter account, @robfellman
It is great a pleasure to take a great class and implement the lessons the same day. Thanks Robert.
Robert,
Some schools have accounts that are controlled by others and they are typically for Lead Generation purposes which is a completely different objective than what career services has in mind. How can your career services department use social media to accomplish your objectives? First, identify your objectives and then ask yourself how social media simply plays a role...not THE role. Try to use social media not merely to disseminate information, but to drive the action you need. Think in marketing terms - what are the "conversions" you want to occur? Is this using a blog to build traffic (Audience), to engage audience, and to use that attention you've captured to sign up for events such as a webinar, a workshop, etc.? How can the audience built be used to help spread your message and get others involved? This is merely one simple example.
Robert Starks Jr.
I am in a similar boat as you Jennifer. We tend to have accounts, but our objectives are not clear. We find the social network sites to be great for disseminating information and for SEO, but lack with other important attributes.
Jennifer ,
Many people are diving into social media and describing their activities vs. their strategies. For instance, someone may say that they are using social media to post blogs, promote events, and skip trace graduates. These are activities vs. strategies. The struggle you describe is normal. Hopefully, you will begin asking yourself some important questions after this training. If you're going to leverage a social media strategy as one component of an overall department-wide strategy, in what ways will you leverage it? How will you establish a long-term, goal-driven strategy and what tactics will make sense for that strategy? Start slow and start with minimal objectives. In fact, start with one and as you progress, you can add more objectives. Measure to see your results and consider documenting your results as part of your school's Institutional Effectiveness Plan as another means of demonstrating results such as increased event participation, increased student visits to the office, etc. You may also want to see if you begin to identify a correlation between when you begin a social media strategy and if you see satisfaction surveys improve for students' perception of the department and the service you provide. There are many different things you can do once you know what your plan is and what your objectives are which seems to be the most challenging part for many. I encourage you to follow up with me if you have additional questions. I recommend reviewing the strategy sample documents at the end of the course which provide a simple outline of how a strategy can come together. It may be a bit too specific for some because it has very specific metrics and Key Performance Indicators but this is the right way to do it if you're interested in measuring results.
I'm hear if you need more guidance.
Take care.
Robert Starks Jr.
To this point I think I've failed at managing my social media accounts successfully. I've learned from the class that I need to start today by first establishing a message/brand and creating some clear cut goals with our social media. There is much that I can improve on moving forward.
