Meet #hesm pros to follow: Alicia Nestle (@anestle) from @NazarethCollege on social media success, challenges & tips

Alicia Nestle, Assistant Director-Multimedia and PR at Nazareth College, is one of the 15 higher ed professionals who presented at the 2nd Higher Ed Social Media Conference (now available on-demand).

Alicia is responsible for the institution’s social media strategy and activities. She is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program on Social Media Marketing for Higher Ed.

In this 3-question interview, Alicia tells us about her most successful initiative with social media, her biggest challenge and shares some advice on how to cope with the 24/7 world of social media in higher education. Oh – and she also granted my request for a selfie!

1) What is the most successful social media initiative you’ve run over the past year?

The most successful social media campaign I’ve run this year is this one – the one I will present at the HESM14 conference (“Thanks for the #NazMoveIn Memories”). Honestly, it’s been a success because it’s the one where I’ve practiced a lot of what I learned in the Social Media Marketing for Higher Ed course I took last fall.

2) What is the biggest challenge you face in your social media work? How do you cope with it?

The biggest challenge I face is all the different hats I wear in my work as a public relations professional, which includes social media.

I recently attended a conference where Deirdre Breakenridge was one of the keynote speakers. She put up a slide titled the “PR Hybrid Professional Chart of Responsibilities” and I almost fell out of my chair!

In that chart, she diagrammed everything I’ve been feeling. So often, my biggest challenge is feeling like I never get to do anything 100% because I really have to divide my time and efforts between the many projects and responsibilities I have.

3) Social media work never stops. How do you maintain balance in your life & work given this constraint? Any tips, techniques or tools?

I definitely feel the pressure of trying to keep up with “the latest and the greatest” offerings in social media. I try to remember that these are just new tools for good old fashioned communication, and the most important thing to communicate is who we are as a College.

Right now, I work full-time and am about 3/4 of my way through a master’s in management degree. I’m a wife and a mom to a 7-year-old. About a year ago, I took up running which is now my new passion that I fit in 4 X’s a week at 5 a.m. So my plate is pretty full!

For work, I use a social media management tool called Sprout Social and I really love it. It is very user-friendly and allows me to monitor, post and reply on our main Facebook and Twitter feeds easily. It has great reporting features (analytics) and I’m also able to add smaller department accounts to keep an eye on their activity as well.

Work really started creeping into my home life this summer and fall. When my daughter started asking me to put my cell phone down and talk to her, I knew I had to make a change.

So I implemented a few rules for myself:

1. No looking at my phone from the time I leave work(4:30 p.m.) until 8 p.m.
2. At 8 p.m., I check social media on Sprout Social and respond/retweet/like, etc. anything new that’s happened from the time I left work until then. I do not look at the social feeds again for the rest of the night
3. I do not look at email at all from the time I leave work until 6 a.m. the next morning. If it’s an emergency, someone will call or text me. Otherwise, it can wait. I look at social feeds again at 6 a.m. for any overnight activity.