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Social Media Marketing Tips and Best Practices for Alumni Engagement
- 2. We can HELP!
- 11. MIAMI: 16,200 OSU: 19,800 Alumni on Facebook OHIO: 32,880
- 12. QUESTIONS?
Editor's Notes
- How many of you are using social media? Posting on behalf of your chapter/society? Posting using personal or branded account?
- We’re here to help you with event promotion, spreading the word about Ohio University and the uniqueness of the place/people.
- Our handles – tag @OHIOAlumni in your tweets and posts and we’ll often re-tweet. I’m on Twitter and Instagram, on Twitter posting lots of content for you about using social to reach your audience, and putting together a small group of staff to help connect with your members and other alumni. You’ll see more of us as branded accounts coming up as we get our new coordinator in place and develop the program.
- Facebook is our primary social tool we use to interact with alumni – if you don’t use any social media for your chapter or society, FB is an easy and fun place to start. A little more interactive and less of a broadcast medium than Twitter or Instagram but you’ll find a greater number of alumni on there. We’ll talk more about FB and how you can use it for leverage in a bit.
- We’re also on Pinterest and LinkedIn, these accounts are in the wings right now but both have a good number of followers and if you’re active on either of those platforms, I encourage you to follow us and get involved in posts and re-pins, discussions, etc.
- University Communications & Marketing offers a terrific resource for connecting with campus via social – you can find it online at /socialmedia. Esp if you’re connected to one of these areas as a volunteer, it’s good to reference them often on Twitter, FB, whatever medium they are on. Tagging and linking let alumni know where to find the resources they’re looking for and are a good way to promote OHIO as a whole. We try to cross-pollinate as much as possible, esp. with the regional campuses.
- We want to help you get your message out… Content writing best practices. Think about your primary audience, do a little research to see where they spend time online and how they share information.
- Social media policy document – review.
- What is a hashtag? “Hashtags are a pound sign immediately followed by a keyword. They’re used for categorization on social media. Yes, they can be annoying if overused. And yes, I’ve seen the hashtag video of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake.” Should you use them? Yes!! #ohiouonthegreen Establish and use a hashtag for each of your events. Live tweeting is very popular w/attendees and there are lots of tools to help you do so. Bufferapp.com, Hootsuite.com, Tweetdeck.com all let you schedule tweets in advance and monitor streams in real time.
- Email vs. social vs…. We offer the opportunity to email your constituents. Alumni do want to hear from you, if there’s something in it for them. Email is more personal than social media. We can talk directly to our people via segmenting. Social segmenting tools are crude at best and often require purchasing power if we do attempt to segment. If we’re lucky, alumni have opted-in to receive our emails at events and etc. Email is seen as a more professional or “serious” way to communicate than social. Email “sits there” in their inbox and doesn’t go away unless the user actively deletes it, vs social which they may or may not see. Use email carefully and write as though you are inviting someone special. Reiterate we use your copy, with edits.
- How and why we post to Facebook to maintain our fan base. Posts of regional interest to your chapter or society FB wall. Ask your event coordinator for more info on how to start a chapter/society FB page. Some general tips: Use a photo or photos, ask a question, run a contest. Tips if you want something posted or shared: Send a high-resolution photo, make sure you have share permissions, ask, “Would the average FB user want to see this?” FB’s algorithm change means more and more requirements to “boost” (i.e., pay) for posts. Content that is not boosted tends to garner ¼ or less the shares than content that is. Might want to budget for that in your event promotions.