A presentation given to the BADA group about content strategy and using social media to communicate their business goals to different audiences and crafting experiences that link back to their brand positioning.
4. As of September 2014:
• 71% of online adults
use Facebook
• 60% of online adults
use YouTube
• 28% use Pinterest
• 28% use LinkedIn
• 26% use Instagram
• 23% use Twitter
• 22% use Google+
CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE
YouTube is the
#2 search
engine in the
world.
74% of online
adults use
social
networking
sites
80% of your online
visitors will watch a
video, while only
20% will actually
read content in its
entirety.
52% use
multiple social
media sites a
day
5. WHY SOCIAL MEDIA
MATTERS?
• Expand brand awareness
• Engender loyalty
• Build community/audience
• Amplify vision and strategy
• Engage with stakeholders future, past and
present
• Learn from/monitor others
7. WHAT THE EDUCATION SOCIAL
MEDIA LANDSCAPE LOOKS LIKE AT
THIS MOMENT…
“Social media should no longer be viewed as an
addition to the long list of responsibilities but a way
to accomplish goals and drive active participation
from faculty, students, administrators, alumni, and
recruiters. Social media is more than a medium for
pushing news about campus events; but a method to
create communities around your institution.
Storytelling and sharing visual content through social
media can be used to enhance an institution’s
website, engage constituents, drive website traffic,
strengthen donor relations, strengthen constituent
loyalty, and recruit faculty and students.”
Social Media Marketing Forum for Educational Institutions, November 19, 2014
8. WHAT NEXT?
• Create social
media plan/
content strategy
• Understand
audience &
experience.
• Brand yourself.
• Begin NOW!
9. YOUR TURN… ANSWER
THESE 6 QUESTIONS:
• Can you answer the question “only we…”?
• Can you nurture and sustain a social
media presence?
• Can you be a conversational brand?
• Where are our customers and
competition?
• What is our source of rich content?
• What does success look like?
10. SOCIAL MEDIA
PLAN/STRATEGY
• First dedicate staff and time to your
communications and marketing initiatives.
• Next, figure out your content strategy,
audience, branding, experiences & voice.
• Evaluate platforms and types of media.
• Give it a shot and evaluate.
• Manage content.
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
12. CONTENT STRATEGY
Content Strategy uses credible, trustworthy,
transparent media to communicate stories and
information to enhance an organization’s
strategic goals.
– Unless organizations can reach people with
content that matters to them —where, when and
how they want it —those individuals won’t give
their time and attention to engage with the
content that is critical to an organization’s
success.
– Organizations must provide engaging, credible,
trustworthy and transparent content that
enhances their target audiences’ ability to make
important decisions in their work and personal
lives.
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
13. AUDIENCES
• People will take more of what they need to know
from organizations that give them what they want
to know.
• Your audience can only attend to a certain number
of topics deeply at a time and they will only pay
attention to your topics when motivated to do so.
• You must deeply understand how your audience
spends their time.
– What are they doing at different times during the day
and how can you best meet their needs?
• Personas are archetypes of individuals at the
center of your organization’s target market.
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
14. BRANDING
• Marketing is about understanding people and
designing products and services to meet their needs
and wants, and then communicating this to them.
• A brand is not just the name, a logo or look of a
product or service. It is based on your understanding
of the target audience. It is your idea or concept of
what would be the best idea of the product or service
to them.
• You need to be able to articulate the concept of your
brand very clearly.
• Over time in every organization, you will produce
many different pieces of content, most likely across
different media platforms. The key is that all of them
should be tied to the experiences that your content
strategy calls for.
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
15. BRANDING
How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement:
To (target)
_____________________________
who (characteristic)
______________________,
this brand (what is like)
____________________
that (different from)
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
16. EXPERIENCES & VOICE
• Experiences are how people feel, think and
act when they consume your content or use
your service.
• The collective set of experiences that a
person has with content creates their overall
engagement with the brand.
• Experiences matter for three reasons:
– First, all content creates user experiences.
– Second, experiences are linked to usage.
– Third, you, the creator of the content, can shape
those experiences.
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
17. EXPERIENCES & VOICE
• To hold the attention & interest of an
audience, the writer needs to speak in a
voice the audience will recognize as
someone like them.
• Tone is the mood of the writer’s voice. It gives
a writing voice nuance, depth and color.
• Your audience uses many information
devices during the day. You need to
understand their media-consuming habits to
truly engage your audience with your
important stories and content.
Source: Content Strategy for Professionals 2015
19. SOCIAL MEDIA TO DO’S
• Reserve your username across all social
platforms. (knowem.com)
• Create custom URL’s on each platform.
• Put social media buttons on your website and
newsletters.
• Add Find me at… on all school employees’ email
signatures.
• Update social profiles with headers, profile photos
and fill out about & contact sections completely.
• Create a social media editorial calendar.
• Connect with digital influencers.
20. TIPS FOR SUCCESS
• Platform insights:
– Facebook
– Twitter
– LinkedIn
– Instagram
• It’s important to tell a story that fits the
device both narratively and from a design
perspective.
22. MANAGING CONTENT
• How will your content be managed?
• Create a governance plan for who is
responsible for the material approvals.
• Create a style guide.
• Have a plan for when things go wrong.
• Ensure your content is key word
searchable.
• Make sure your content properly
attributed!
23. RESOURCES
• Google alerts
• Mashable
• Social Media Examiner
• Coursera
• Social Mention
• Alltop
• Wefollow
• Hootsuite
• EdTech
• Canva
24. YOUR TURN! START A
PLAN
• Create your content strategy plan.
– What are your top business goals (3 – 5)
– Analyze current social platforms
– Study audiences; create personas
– Decide on topics/platform/tone & voice
– Assign responsibility & timeline
– Determine what is success
– Redo every 3 months
Editor's Notes
When I was kid, my social network was called "outside".
AOL is the true precursor to today’s social media sites. In 2002, social networking hit its stride with Friendster. A year later, in 2003, LinkedIn and Myspace joined the fray. Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only exercise and remained so for 2 years before opening up to the general public in 2006. Now Facebook boasts more than 1.3 billion active users worldwide.
Over the course of the past 3 years, “Fourth screen” technology — smartphones, tablets, etc. — has changed social networking and the way we communicate with one another entirely. Mobile computing and smartphones now allow anyone to be a photographer, videographer, reporter, observer, activist, friend on an array of visual platforms.
What’s next? Augmented reality; it applies digital interactions to the real world.
Here are the top 10 Most Popular Social Networking Sites as derived from eBizMBA Rank which is a continually updated average of each website's Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast. Updated as of May 1, 2015.
52% of online adults use multiple social media sites. Facebook acts as “home base” — it remains the most popular site for those who only use one, and has significant overlap with other platforms.
Facebook and Instagram exhibit especially high levels of user engagement: a majority of users on these sites check in to them on a daily basis.
92% of parents regularly use a smartphone; mobile interactions are vital.
Social media is the preferred communications channel for people today – it’s how they communicate, it’s how they learn, it’s how they get their news, it’s a major part of everyone’s life.
So I just highlighted how social media is an integral part of everyone’s daily life. Well, it’s equally important for brands and businesses – because that’s where everyone is! It’s a terrific way to engage directly with the audiences that matter to them.
74% of marketers saw an increase in traffic when they spent just 6 hours per week on social media.
78% of Americans say social media impacts their purchasing decisions.
Social = networks + virtual communities
Virtual communities are on a mission. They look for expertise and they want to engage with each other.
In order to engage with our social visitors:
Understand their mission
ID hot topics of interest to them
Filter & focus
People want clarity and expert guidance.
I just laid out the context and landscape for social today and now let’s look at it through the lens of an educational institution – the reason why we’re all here today.
Educational institutions understand the value of social media in a globally connected world, but not all have implemented strategy across the necessary channels. The quantity of new platforms, communities, and opportunities to connect can overwhelm and deter entry and experimentation.
Everyone you want to reach has only 1440 minutes in a day & most of that time is used up doing the essentials: eating, sleeping, working, spending time with people you care about.
There is ferocious competition for people’s precious time!
If content then is everything, how do you make it magnetic, attracting and lifting audiences as you'll see on the left, content must be story driven, useful, findable, current, engaging, flexible, and sharable.
And the biggest word there is story we think in stories, we react in stories, whether it's data or any other kind of content, what's the story?
And then as listed on the right it also needs to be available in the most appropriate formats and channels that matter most not to you but to the audience.
Yes, content is king IF it is strategic and tells a story that’s valued by the audience.
Content strategy is by itself prioritized and important.
But if you really want it to have impact, if you want to engage your audience with it and you will create experiences whether you want to or not, so plan them.
Understand your audience, create an experience which makes them want more and makes them want to come back.
And if you do that, then you'll have great content and an experience. And the audience will give you more time and come back more often.
They are the permanent challenges to creating effective content:
1)There is a rapidly rising tidal wave of information and it will continue to rise forever.
2)Everyone you want to reach has 1440 minutes in their day; not one minute more, and most of that time is already used up with essentials such as eating, sleeping, working spending time with people you care about, etc. That means that there is ferocious competition for people’s precious, limited time.
3)The world is becoming ever more complicated, but people will give you their time and attention if you give them more of what they want.
No more mass audiences
Day parting: morning, afternoon v. night. Messages are different.
Segmenting based on psychographic information (values and motivations) as well as demographic information (age and location) will give you a more complete picture of the cohorts that make up your audience.
Narrative storytelling can illuminate topics for your audience, but make sure to tell your important stories in the ways that your audience wants to successfully build a relationship with them.
Personas: interview people, follow them, learn from stakeholders & research. Spend time w/ people in target market.
Your brand:
A clear central idea – a concept
Makes it clear what the people should believe about any service or product and why this is believable.
Distinguishes the product or service from other competitive possibilities.
The best tool for creating the concept of your brand is to write a positioning statement that specifies who the target segment is, what the core concept of the brand is, and how this is different from your competitors.
Essential to content strategy!
For younger men who dream of a brighter future, the Shenshi brand of trendy but affordable fashion makes men feel and appear more successful to others than they are.
Implementation Tips:
The process for creating experiences starts with understanding your audience. (what do people WANT to feel?)
Experiences begin with a concept: ‘What is our best idea of what the content should mean to its readers or viewers?’
Experiences are applied at three levels: message, distribution and strategic.
- Message means driving audience experiences at the story level.
- Distribution means creating the entire publication, website, podcast or video to drive the experiences you have selected.
- Strategic is the level at which you work to ensure that every audience contact maximizes the experiences you are trying to create.
Implementation Tips:
Be yourself. Be direct. Be specific.
Start with: what is the best media window in your reader’s day to engage with your content?
Is your idea best delivered as one type of media content, or should you think about a portfolio strategy?
Differentiate content:
We respond differently to different messages.
Create short, test messages.
Publish it everywhere and track it using bit.ly.
Bit.ly – tracks how many clicks, geographic data, link history and the sources who have referred this link.
66% of total sharing is done on the Facebook mobile app!
Defining a social media calendar will not only help you to consistently publish more compelling social posts, but it will also make it easier for your to provide measurable ROI.
Find digital influencers by searching for communities talking about your expert topics.
Facebook: engagement is 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays.
Tweets get higher click-through rate on the weekends.
Every platform should be treated differently!
Success in social is developing timely, relevant content.
Be sure to test different messages in the various social channels and keep track of the results.
In the U.S. content users are more likely to share is humorous.
Sharing photos is the most popular activity on Facebook and Google+.
Twitter people like to share comments on daily life.
Facebook's service is constantly updating.
Twitter: One of the main uses for social networking websites is to enable people to post their thoughts instantly. No other social networking sites take full advantage of speed and immediacy more than Twitter. Twitter provides the best way to get a quick fix of celebrity gossip, friend updates and important news stories.
LinkedIn is a professional networking site that focuses on growing your professional network. The search function is where it’s at. Use it to connect with industry professionals, parents, potential board members, donors, etc. Make sure your school has a page and it is updated.
Instagram allows you to easily use pictures and videos to tell and share your school story. It’s more popular among students than any other social media channel these days, and it’s a great way to build your school community around something just about everyone regardless of their age likes to do – and that’s look at pictures.
Facebook: engagement is 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays.
Tweets get higher CTRs on the weekends.
Every platform should be treated differently!
Success in social is developing timely, relevant content.
Be sure to test different messages in the various social channels and keep track of the results.
Social mention: Real-time social media search and analysis on any topic, competitor, etc
Alltop: who is talking about it now
Wefollow: find experts; look for key bloggers