A Plan for Social Media at UF
Jul
20
Lately, it seems my whole life revolves around social media. If I’m not sending messages on our UF Webadmin Twitter account about great work being done at UF on the web or tweaking the UF Twitter account, I’m monitoring the University of Florida Facebook page to see how engaging our posts are to the fans.
So far, we’ve seen some success. In the recent study of Facebook fan pages in Higher Education done by BlueFuego, they reported that the University of Florida Facebook page had almost a 2,500% increase in followers within a three-month period, which was the largest increase of any major university. Of course, we’d like to take credit for that massive increase, but much of that was done prior to our more active management of the page.
Because of all this Facebook attention, it’s important to make our goal to create as much engagement as possible for those people that are already on board. We have started by feeding UF news onto the UF Facebook page. This has increased engagement, but more can be done, in my opinion. This is why our office is researching best practices for management and interactivity that we hope will help all UF units get the most out of social media.
If you have any suggestions or ideas for ways we can use social media to promote UF and expand our reach, we encourage your comments and suggestions. Also, if you manage an official UF social media account, feel free to fill out our online form.
July 21st, 2009 at 11:42 am
I am curious to know, how you define “engagement”? Is “feeding news” engaging? Or do subscribers have the ability to contribute news? (That’s engaging.)
I am also curious to know what your social media goals are. Subscribers are one measure of success. But what are they doing once they subscribe?
Social media is more than just one-to-many communication. It has the potential of many-to-many–that is, for engagement.
To foster engagement people need:
a call to action — a request to participate
an incentive — a way to get involved that is meaningful to them
acknowledgment — a way of knowing they have been heard or paid attention to
Remember, when you’re talking about engaging people, you’re talking about building relationships or creating the means for people to build meaningful/sustainable relationships. People want to talk to each other, to share stories, and to celebrate, in this case, being a Gator.
Consider how newspapers allow people to submit comments online to editorial content. These letters to the editor come from people’s desire to respond to what they read and knowledge that what they write will be made public for others to consider.
Similarly, you may ask yourself, in what ways can the content we publish online be a call to action? What ways can we incentivize our publics? And how can we acknowledge contributors?
Crowdsourcing is another example of getting your publics engaged. Is there an issue you want hep with? Should you involve faculty members and researchers? Athletes? Coaches. Alums? Think of what UF is known for: academics, athletics, partying…. How can you use social media to engage people around these topics? Polls are a popular way to get people to enter the conversation.
So the question seems to be, how do you want people to engage and what tools will you use to support this engagement? Given the diversity of publics you have access to via social media, some priorities need to be made. You also need a set of standards in which you expect engagement to fall within (we all need rules).
I am glad you are being public about sharing your situation. Perhaps an advisory group of local experts might be helpful to frame where you want to go and how you want to get there (wink wink nudge nudge).
July 21st, 2009 at 12:27 pm
First, I’m encouraged to see that you’re reading our blog. Thanks!
Admittedly, the word “engagement” is very nebulous and broad. It was really meant to be. I agree that the type of engagement is dependent upon the audience and goals.
Can I assume that your subtle wink and nudge is an indication that you are one of those local experts willing to meet and discuss social media? If you were assembling a group of local experts on social media, who would they be?
July 21st, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Bruce,
There are probably a half a dozen or so people I can recommend. However, I am a huge proponent of the 7 P’s: proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance. Rather than put together a team first, I suggest putting together an initial plan that outlines specific, tangible goals that you think you would like to see accomplished. With that, I would suggest we sit down over a delicious burrito (I hear you own stock in Chipotle ^ ^) and talk about how a team as such could assist you in getting your goals accomplished.
Send me at tweet if you think this is something you’d like to try. @csessums
July 22nd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I *wish* I owned stock in Chipotle!
I’ll be in touch.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
I think UF’s use of social media will straddle both paradigms - one-to-many communication and many-to-many communication. With the fragmentation of other media sources and the increasing difficulty of informing students about events and news on campus, the use of social media to disseminate this information, in addition to more engaging conversations, is needed.
- Jeff