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Higher Ed Marketing Memos by Tiffany Clements

It’s never too late to build a student social media squad

Building a team of well-trained students to lead social media content creation and distribution is not a new idea on college campuses – and even in the Higher Ed Marketing Memos series as Angi Roberts and Lansing Bryan wrote about this topic in the past.

In fact, it wasn’t a new idea for us at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University (CSB/SJU).

We just hadn’t really done it successfully — until last semester and the start of our Digital Ambassadors Program.

Expanding the number of voices — and bodies — behind CSB/SJU’s social media stories has allowed us to tell more of them across all platforms and networks.

We’ve built a solid foundation for the program by following three easy steps:

  1. Create structure focused on training, empowering and supporting a student team
  2. Set up checks and balances for their work
  3. And — perhaps this was the toughest one — work on overcoming the controlling tendencies many/most social media managers have

Structure, rules and the wisdom to know the difference

In the past, we’d extended an open-ended invitation to students to share with us, via a Facebook group, photos or tidbits for posting on our social media profiles. While we sometimes got great candid moments of student life to share, we largely got backs of heads, landscapes and photos taken by well-meaning students that we just couldn’t use.

If we were going to leverage the talent and energy of our students, we needed more structure.

To set up that structure, we created our digital ambassadors team from student employment positions. Connecting students’ work to a paycheck helped set proper expectations from the start. That start also involved team training and orientation.

During the training, I gave the ambassadors an introduction to the work the Office of Marketing and Communication does on campus, why it matters and where it fits in the overall mission of the organization. I also explained how our marketing team collaborates with other teams in admission and alumnae/i relations to create and amplify stories for all members of our campus community. We talked about word choices and the importance of “sounding” like the same person in the posts published on our institutional accounts.

Boundaries and red-lines were mentioned, too, but just not as much. In the time I’ve spent doing this work I haven’t run into a situation where a student, while posting on behalf of the schools, has demonstrated a lack of judgement so egregiously poor as to constitute an emergency. I, by the way, have more than once accidentally (and temporarily) posted some thoughts about a professional wrestling pay-per-view on our official Twitter profile (!).

Ambassadors need to be empowered to do great work rather than afraid of doing bad work. This is the defining difference between structure and rules. Having an idea of where we’re asking them to go, rather than the fear of treading where they’re not allowed, students can add their own perspectives and make positive contributions to our overall social media presence. The result is more fun, authentic and representative of the student experience at CSB/SJU.

Checks and balances

Digital ambassadors – a team of three during the first semester – maintain office hours. This means they can check in with me, but also with each other. The team meets weekly to discuss upcoming events and potential “stories” to cover.

We instituted a “two sets of eyes” policy. This means someone, either myself or another of the ambassadors, reads and reviews every scheduled post before it’s published. This helps us check and re-check our work and gives students the opportunity to learn from one another.

Students on the team are given a profile and access to our Hootsuite account. From that dashboard, they have access to the same monitoring information I check daily and opportunity to see what content was created, how it was edited and when it was scheduled. This exposure to the process helped them learn quickly how we chose our words on social media, what images worked best for us and, importantly, what others were saying about us online.

Let it go, let it go…

With our digital ambassadors trained, empowered and checking on each other, there was really nothing more for me to do but get out of the way.

This was much tougher than I’d expected it to be. I left them alone for 20 minutes and they made this .gif.

I’d spent four years building a voice, identifying words we did and didn’t use on certain networks, choosing top-notch animated .gifs to respond to enthusiastic tweets.

I felt confident these students knew what they were doing and, maybe more importantly, knew how to ask for help when they didn’t. I knew I could confidently stand behind their choices and support them if mistakes were made. Still, I struggled to cede some control.

And it’s still a struggle. I don’t have an easy answer or quick-fix for this. I learn more about their perspectives and skills and that deepens my trust for them and their work.

What a difference a semester makes?

Measuring the impact of our digital ambassadors and their work is a work in progress at this point.

What’s clear is that the students have helped us increase our output. Going from one person posting to four, we upped the frequency and volume of our posting.

During the 3-month period of September, October and November 2015, CSB/SJU shared an average of 12.4 tweets and 4.5 Facebook posts a week.

In those 3 months in 2016, we shared an average of 13.5 tweets and 6.8 Facebook posts a week.

In the coming months, I’d love to see the posts written and shared by our digital ambassadors be more popular with our audience than those I produce. For now, though, I’m willing to settle for student-produced Facebook posts to account for two of the top ten of our Facebook posts this semester in terms of both reach and engagement.

This increase in people power has helped us grow our connections on campus.

Our digital ambassadors partnered with another student employee team out of our admission office and, thanks almost entirely to student coordination and motivation, we’ve been able to put @csbsjusnaps, our Snapchat account, in the hands of at least 15 trained students.

Sydd from our admission office put together an AMAZING Snapchat story for us

Since in-network analytics to measure the reach of these efforts don’t exist yet (anybody else think an IPO will change that quick, btw?), I approximated our Snap reach based on a conservative formula I learned during my Higher Ed Experts course on social media measurement for higher ed.

Using a formula Lindsay Nyquist shared during a 2016 Higher Ed Analytics Conference presentation, I made some rough calculations about audience size. Based on the statistic that about 2/3rds of Snapchat users check the network daily, a manager can multiply the number of views on any given post by 3/2 to get a rough idea of audience size, according to Nyquist. Using that metric, our audience grew from about 300 in December 2015 to about 850 in December 2016. Plus, we managed to get a picture of one of our students with the Pope. How cool is that?

Students on our study abroad program in Italy at the Vatican

Students took the phone with them on choir trips, to Saturday football games and around the world on study abroad. These trained and talented students have helped CSB/SJU tell a rich and diverse story to our audience.

The extra benefits

Time to take on other endeavors has, without a doubt, been one of the biggest advantages for me from the successful rollout our digital ambassadors program.

Last semester I was able to contribute to the production of ten videos for distribution through various communication channels. The semester before that, I had the free time to pitch in on closer to five.

Plus, this team made it possible for me to step back from my responsibilities and complete nine graduate credits last semester. Without their steady thumbs pressing post, I don’t think I could have done it. Thanks, guys!

Meet the Author: Tiffany Clements

Tiffany Clements is the Social Media Specialist at College of Saint Benedict and St. John’s University. She is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program in Social Media Measurement for Higher Ed

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