Andrew Cassel, Social Content Strategist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2019 Higher Ed Content Conference.
In this 4-question interview, Andrew shares with us thoughts on content creation process and measurement, interesting higher ed content and a favorite tool.
1) What does your content creation process look like?
I curate content from wherever I can find it.
Some days it’s super easy. A new press release is posted on the news site and I can share it from there. The campus photographer has captured a new a beautiful image that communicates a strong sense of place. A volcano webcam captured a beautiful sunset in remote Alaska. I just craft a post for the news release, share the image, or create a short video or GIF from the webcam footage. Those are normal paths and get content out on the platforms.
Then, I create some content myself. I curate playlists for Spotify, make a pop culture GIF to get engagement for a post about deadlines. For the weekends, I try to share evergreen content like student profiles and dig into online sources of entertainment. The library has subscriptions to video streaming catalogs and electronic libraries. Those are great things to share in the evenings or other times when I want to be present in people’s feeds but not be reminding them of deadlines or to do their homework.
My ultimate goal with social media for my school is to be a cool friend that offers good information and small moments of delight. The content recipe to achieve is a tasty mix of content provided by others and a content created by me.
2) How is the performance of your content measured at your school?
I report the numbers of followers to all the accounts. But the real metrics that my bosses use to measure success is the percentage calculated from how many people saw posts in a given month and how much engagement happened on the page in that month. The idea is that higher engagement means better content. We look at lifetime numbers for engagement to take into account that some people see stuff that was shared weeks or months ago and engage with it later.
3) Share 3 pieces of higher ed content that made you envious or proud
Jon-Stephen Stansel’s GIFs with his school leadership is hard to beat for me. He’ll talk about that project during the conference.
The University of Hawaii at Manoa has a great Facebook presence. Lovely sense of place images, nice graphics for their Aloha Friday content, and I enjoy their mix of news content and fun content.
These tweets from Western Washington University are great. Using emojis to help describe content fires up my imagination. Just answering this question and looking at this example encourages me to emulate this in my next tweet.
4) What’s your favorite new tool for your work with content?
I am enjoying using Be Live, a Facebook Live tool that lets me sit at my desk and interview people and broadcast that on the Facebook page. Be Live lets me schedule the Live events so people can join them and get reminded about the upcoming broadcast. I spent a little money on the tool, so I can add some branded colors and backgrounds to the broadcast. It’s great and I look forward to seeing what else I can do with it!
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.
Tags: HECO19, Higher Ed Marketing, Higher Ed News