BU Social Media Communicators: Fall 2017 Meeting Recap

Couldn’t make it to this semester’s gathering of the University’s social media communicators? Here’s what you missed:

Editorial Calendars

Managing social media channels means being on top of a ton of key dates, campaigns and content. It’s imperative to remember to resurface old content when it’s timely (such as a video about a haunted space on campus during Halloween season), but it’s so hard to keep up.

The solution: a robust editorial calendar. We reviewed a sample of our editorial calendar, which includes “at-a-glance” views for yearly, monthly, and weekly topics of importance categorized by social network. Since its implementation, the editorial calendar has allowed us to be more organized and timely as well as provide transparency into our efforts for folks beyond the social media team. It has also extended the shelf-life of our content, which we can continue to reuse as it becomes timely again. For example, a video created to share during BU’s annual Lobster Night in 2016 once again found value on “National Lobster Day” in June, 2017.

Social Listening

What is social “listening?” It’s a data analytics tool that examines conversations about your brand happening across the web — not just on your owned social channels. Prior to its implementation, social media managers could only effectively capture a small percentage of all mentions of their brand: Those that directly @ mention us, those in comments on our pages and items that could readily be found via a rudimentary Twitter search. Social listening, however, scans hundreds of millions of online sources — social channels, the web, news, forums, blogs, video sites — to surface relevant mentions of topics of interest to you.

Currently, here at BU, we are using the Sprinklr add-on for social listening as it integrates with our existing monitoring dashboards.

So, how are we using it? Just a few of our current use cases:

• Identifying and targeting social Influencers with relevant content
• Assisting in community-building efforts and identifying user-generated content
• Understanding demographics and sentiment
• Determining the full reach of our work beyond owned channels
• Crisis detection

Instagram Stories vs. Snapchat Stories

Before we made the decision to dive into Instagram stories, we asked the following question: How would we differentiate this content from our stories on Snapchat? Ultimately, we began to view them as two distinct tools with different objectives. We wanted to capitalize on the features on which Instagram excels — discoverability, ease of uploading pre-existing content and a full array of visual tools — to tell a different story than we were telling on Snapchat.

Snapchat currently serves as a place to highlight the student experience and is viewed primarily as a great tool for 1-to-1 communication. Our audience on that channel is almost exclusively current and prospective students, so its demographic skews a bit younger than that of our Instagram audience. Our Snapchat also consistently featuring original content uploaded in real-time. Instagram Stories, on the other hand, are being used more as a broadcast platform focused on University events and to highlight top-level existing content such as Research stories.

Thus far, we’ve been successful in using Instagram stories to promote our standard Instagram posts and to drive traffic to related BU editorial pieces. A key to this success has been the use of a free, professional editing tool — Adobe Spark — that allows us to create visually compelling graphics in a pre-sized template for Instagram Stories.

Facebook Live & Reddit AMA’s

Recently, the PR team has been experimenting with a number of live social media tools to connect our faculty experts directly with diverse and targeted audiences.

Reddit AMA’s (short for “Ask Me Anything”) feature a faculty member answering questions from the public related to an area of their research or expertise. We’ve found significant success when these AMA’s can be tied to a timely topic. For example, baseball statistician Andy Andres hosted an AMA that made it to the front page of Reddit about the MLB playoffs, perfectly timed to coincide with the end of the regular season. The social media team works to publicize this effort on various subreddits and across our owned social media channels. For more information on how to host a Reddit AMA, check out this guide and read a recap here.

A similar initiative has been taking place on Facebook Live, where we’ve asked experts to speak on a timely topic that has broad public appeal. For example, a nutritionist and BU professor Joan Salge-Blake spoke about keeping New Year’s health resolutions with audiences live on January 3.

A key to the success of Facebook Live? Sharing an announcement of the broadcast in advance with potential parties of interest and asking them to share the post in real-time with their followers. For example, a Facebook Live about progress on a bionic pancreas for those with Type I Diabetes was shared by the American Diabetes Association, resulting in thousands of earned views.

Content Marketing

Our experiences on Facebook Live also reiterate the value in sharing content with relevant audiences. As we know from our own experiences, social media has made every organization a content-hungry business. At Boston University, we have no shortage of content related to our students, faculty, research and University as a whole. We’ve begun to look for ways in which we can broaden the reach of this content beyond our campus and the BU community.

Thus, we’ve made a concerted effort to identify and engage influencers to help share our content. Who do we mean when we say influencer? Funding agencies, publishers or social media gurus in a related field, to name a few. For example, one story we wrote about a professor doing research on the children of incarcerated parents was shared with famed prison reform advocate (and author of Orange is the New Black) Piper Kerman, who subsequently shared the story with her large Twitter following. For research pieces, we always engage funding agencies, such as the NIH or NSF, to help us spread the word about the great work they are funding. Think broadly — but strategically — about who might be interested in the story you’re telling, and why it is important to them and their following. Then, connect with them via email, contact forms or on social media and make sure you illustrate the value your piece of content can deliver to their community.

Video on Social Media

We also spoke briefly about the changes we’ve made to our video creation and distribution strategy given changing viewing habits on social media. In early 2016, despite videos consistently ranked as the most popular type of content on social media, videos on our main social channels were falling short of our performance expectations. We looked at the data to tell us why and came to three major conclusions:

1. Average Length Viewed: At the time, viewers were only watching 28 seconds of our videos on average. However, most videos were nearly three minutes long, meaning audiences were missing a huge amount of the content.
2. Sound: We discovered 90–95% of our content was being viewed without sound. While adding captions was a workaround, it wasn’t necessarily enough to get people to opt-in to the content.
3. Retention: We noticed a precipitous drop-off after videos started auto-playing in Facebook feeds. What was it about our content that wasn’t immediately capturing people’s attention?

Armed with this information we made a few major changes to our videos that have resulted in an increase in engagements of 395% and a 235% increase in the average number of views. Here’s what we changed:

1. Aspect Ratio: Cropped to 1:1 rather than landscape so as to occupy more real estate in a mobile news feed. This also allows us to share any videos on Instagram without resizing issues.
2. Sound: We made all of our videos viewable entirely without sound. The result? Now, more people watch our videos with sound. Counter-intuitive, we know. It seems that providing text overlays on the video was a key to getting audiences to opt in to the content and thus up their volume.
3. Hook: Understanding that the first three seconds of the video were the most crucial, we set out to hook viewers with provocative beginnings that we hoped would draw them in to watch more.
4. Length: We tried to limit all videos for social to 60 seconds or less, which often resulted in the video featuring one major takeaway. The result was actually an improvement in our average time viewed, meaning folks were opting in to the content for a greater proportion than ever before.

Want to see a “Before & After” example? See how these simple switches made a video about tree frog embryos on our Facebook page go viral.

The Conversation

Finally, we ended the meeting with a guest speaker. Ari Fertig, Manager of University Editorial Relations at The Conversation spoke to communicators about best practices for working with the editors of his site and the benefits to both sides. The Conversation is a nonprofit news website that features articles written by academic experts. The Conversation pairs experts with professional editors to help prepare content for the general public. It’s also published under a Creative Commons license, which means content written for their site can be republished nearly anywhere — including a recent example of a republished story by a BU Dean in Time.

What are the benefits? It’s a fantastic resource for academic experts looking to share the impact of their research. In addition, academics and their institutions receive a “Metrics” page indicating the visibility and reach of their scholarship. To work with Ari or suggest faculty experts, you can reach out to him at: ari.fertig@theconversation.com and see more about their work.

We sincerely hope attendees found the meeting helpful and look forward to hearing about the innovative ways they are using social in our spring gathering. If you have a topic you’d like to share at the next SMC meeting or questions about the topics presented this month, reach out to us: social@bu.edu

By: Emily Truax, Assistant Director of Social Media, Boston University