Everyday #highered Social Media: great story & tips by Tiffany Broadbent Beker (@tb623) from College of William&Mary

Tiffany Broadbent Beker, Social Media Coordinator at College of William & Mary, is one of the 12 higher ed professionals who presented at the 1st Higher Ed Social Media Conference in December 2013.

In this 3-question interview from November 2013, Tiffany told us about one of her great social media moments, her favorite social tool and shares some advice.

1) Can you share one of your great social media moments with us?

Getting unexpected interaction is the best part of the job, seeing the things that really resonate with your fans, and for W&M (and I expect many colleges and universities) it’s nostalgia. One example at W&M is a post from July mentioning that housing assignments had gone out to new students and asked fans where they lived and if they had any advice for incoming students.

We posted this along with a photo of one of the more eclectic/historic freshman dorms and had an amazing response, with nearly 300 comments on the post and 2,000 photo views and it was fantastic.

2) What is your favorite social media tool of all time?

My favorite tool is one that I use more often personally than professionally and that’s If This Then That. It helps to streamline and interconnect a lot of online sites and it’s great to use for backing up data. For instance, all of my tweets are automatically backed up to an Evernote, and any photos I’m tagged in on Facebook are downloaded to Dropbox.

Favorite tools I use for W&M are all aggregators of some variety: Storify, Eventstagr.am and most recently, Tagboard. Using these types of tools is a great way to show a more complete social media picture of an event (in that anyone who knows the hashtag can contribute). Aggregation also provides an opportunity to involve folks who may not necessarily participate in social media on a regular basis (or at all), by offering an opportunity to see what’s going on via social media but that has a low (or non-existent) barrier to entry.

3) What advice would you give to somebody who is just starting in social media?

Take your time and don’t feel like you have to be everywhere at once. Start with just one channel, build your audience there, get a feel for what your community is looking for in terms of information, discover what tone and voice works best, and then take small steps from there.

If photos are really popular with your audience, perhaps start dabbling next in Instagram or Flickr, or if videos are really getting a lot of interaction maybe check out YouTube or Vine.