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Sonja Likness FoustSonja Likness Foust, Director of Social Media and Content Strategy at Duke University, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2018 Higher Ed Content Conference.

In this 3-question interview, Sonja tells us about the best content advice ever, content performance measurement and a favorite content tool.

1) What is the best advice you’ve ever been given when it comes to content?

Think of audience first! There’s no point in creating content at all if you don’t know who’s going to look at it. When you’re thinking of audience, you’re also going to have to think about distribution so that you know how to reach your audience. If your audience is students, your distribution strategy and channels are going to be much different than if your audience is parents and families. You might even need different types of content—for example, a quick Snapchat video for your students, and a newsletter for your parents and families.

2) How is the performance of your content measured/evaluated at your school?

We measure our big content pieces campaign-style, so we look at how the content performed across all of our channels, including web and social. We then benchmark those numbers with our standards for similar stories. It involves a lot of elbow-deep analytics work in Google Analytics and all of the social analytics platforms, manual screen-capturing and copy-pasting, and using our thinking caps to figure out conclusions based on the data. It’s worth it, though! We base decisions for future content largely on how past content has performed and how well it performed on different channels.

3) What is your favorite content tool?

I end up using Final Cut Pro X a lot in my job, even though video isn’t really in my job description. Having a few video editing skills really helps me to right-size content for my different social media channels. I can quickly resize a horizontal video to vertical for Snapchat or Instagram Stories, or add captions for an Instagram feed video, or even put together a moving slideshow for YouTube or Facebook. Of course there are other video editing tools out there, but I find Final Cut Pro X to be really intuitive and quick for projects that have a fast turn-around.

A conference focusing on higher ed content?

The Higher Ed Content Conference is a must-attend event for higher ed content professionals and teams looking for new ideas and best practices.

Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Content Conference say about the experience.

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