BU Social Media Communicators: Spring 2017

Key Takeaways

Pitching our Editorial Teams

John O’Rourke and Barbara Moran of BU Today and BU Research gave an overview of their publications and provided their best tips on what makes a good pitch to the editorial teams.

BU Today

BU Today has a general audience of students, faculty, parents and the media. A variety of different stories are published five times a week.

The “Close-Up” section: This section covers stories of which the team has few resources and time to prepare for them or if they’ve done a similar feature story in the past. It is particularly useful in drawing attention to events/issues/campus clubs without using resources required for a full story.

BU Research

BU Research focuses on a largely external audience, consisting of funders and other university scientists. It aims to cover ongoing research across all disciplines from the sciences to the humanities. Stories with ties to current events tend to do well but the website regularly features evergreen content.

Bostonia

Bostonia is BU’s alumni magazine, which publishes three times a year. It covers a mix of profiles across all schools and disciplines. Bostonia tends to work alongside BU Today and BU Research to share content and coordinate stories appropriately. Data visualization, slideshows, videos, and infographics are an important element of each story.

Pitching a Story

Tips from the Editors on Pitching:

• Be BRIEF — pitches should be short, direct, and well-crafted
• Do NOT send press releases
• Include multimedia when available
• Provide the contact info of subjects in story
• Give as much advance notice as possible

BU Arts Initiative

Sarah Collins from BU’s Arts Initiative provided insight and advice on how to best utilize Mailchimp and other social media outlets for greater outreach and engagement, specifically when it comes to event attendance.

Twitter

• Use direct tweets (@ mentioning influential users) to get the word out without sending email & encourage RT’s
• Giveaways work especially well for getting students to visit the office.
• Link your Instagram to our Twitter using IFTTT to share visually appealing content.
• Create Twitter lists for better organization: The Arts Initiative is using Twitter lists to pitch media and influencers for each specific event they host.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a platform to use to get the word out on events on a regular basis without having to provide in the body of an email and provide events details and direct links to ticketing/event information. Events for a ten-day period are pulled from the BU calendar and displayed in a visually appealing template with “jump to” anchors throughout.

As a result of these combined efforts, the Arts Initiative has seen an explosion of interest in their events from both inside and outside of the BU community.

Analytics

We spoke very broadly about the measurement approaches teams should be taking in their social media strategies. Based on the experiences of the central office, we created a four-step framework for identifying meaningful metrics to social performance:

1. Identify Overarching Goals: What are the goals that matter the most to your unit? Is it improving yield or number of applicants to specific graduate programs? Improving program ranking? Increasing research grants? These should be identified by upper management and/or deans.
2. Determine the Communication Activities that Support these Goals: What communication and social media activities that you undertake are advancing these goals?
3. Identify the Metrics that Determine Success/Failure: How will you know if these communication activities have been successful? What are the metrics you can identify that have a meaningful impact?
4. Measure Them! Use the data you gather to inform your strategy and determine business outcomes. Repeat the process all over again and adjust your metrics and goals as necessary.

We also spoke about the metrics that provide good insight across social networks and are a good launching point for an analytics strategy. These include:

• Engagement Metrics are great but an Engagement Ratio is even better as it takes into account reach and gives context to data. This number (represented as number of engagements/number of people the content reached) shows a particular post’s ability to resonate with an audience.
• Traffic Generation: Much of what social media communicators are tasked with doing is driving users to a particular landing page, editorial story or sign-up page. Tracking how much traffic is coming from these channels is an essential metric in determining efficacy.
• Volume of Inbound Messages: How likely is your audience to mention you, tag you and engage with you on social media?
• Sentiment: A high volume of inbound messages and large number of engagements don’t necessarily tell the whole story if the conversation occuring surrounding your brand is largely negative. Be sure to include sentiment to tell if your messaging is resonating with your audience.

SEO

Carol Duan and David Keefe-Bergeron from BU Today spoke about BU’s current search engine optimization efforts utilizing MozPro. Currently, the University is using the tool to research search queries that our content may be an answer to, find the most commonly-used search terms and ideally, identify search terms that are being used frequently but which don’t have many high-quality results for our content to compete with.

Another huge component of BU’s SEO work is in enhancing our “domain authority” according to Google and other search engines, or the quality Google deems our page to be, which influences results rankings. A key way in which we’re doing so is internal and external link building. By linking to relevant, quality content on our own pages, Google considers our content thorough and well researched, and therefore respected. By having external (non “bu.edu”) sites link back to our content, our domain authority is increased even more.

So, why does SEO matter to social media?

Ultimately, the two are trying to achieve the same thing — optimize our content for a specific audience and do so in a way that makes it compelling and relevant. Additionally, Twitter & Facebook’s native search functions in a similar way and including relevant keywords in your captions on these networks will enhance your ranking when people are searching both internally — as well as for search results that are publicly available in Google such as Twitter’s.

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, Digital Engagement Associate, Boston University

Special thanks to: Remi Duhe (COM’18)