Meet #hesm pros to follow: Tony Dobies (@dobiest) from @WestVirginiaU on social media success, challenges & tips

Tony Dobies, Senior Writer at West Virginia University is one of the 15 higher ed professionals who presented at the 2nd Higher Ed Social Media Conference (now available on-demand).

Tony is in charge of WVU’s presence on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. He also develops much of the University’s strategic social media campaigns.

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

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

It would have to be our marketing and promotion of our holiday video from a year ago.

We developed what we called “Simple (Social) Gifts” that we gave out to our social media followers for 12 straight days prior to the release of our holiday video. These gifts included our famous “Flying WV” sugar cookie recipe, a coloring sheet for kids and phone and desktop backgrounds, among others. The campaign helped build excitement and improve our views and visits to our video and accompanying website. For more, check out this blog post. And, of course, we have something bigger and better planned this December.

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

The biggest challenge is finding enough hours in a day to accomplish everything. Currently, I not only serve as the main social media voice of our university, but I am a writer, as well, so I have to multi-task on most days.

In a perfect situation where we have ample resources and time, we would all have the opportunity to research, concept develop, set goals, manage, engage and report with social media. It just doesn’t happen that often.

To cope, I focus on the things that are most important to us as a university – delivering on our goals and engaging our key audiences. And, maybe most importantly, I have two awesome interns who help with the day-to-day social media work, which allows me the freedom to look at the big picture and how we can plan for the future.

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

Like you said, it never stops… and usually neither do I.

My bosses yell at me, because I work all the time, so I might not be the best person to give advice on this, but I can tell you what I’ve learned over time on the topic. It’s best to always have a backup, so that you can step away every now and then and go on vacation or just have a lazy day every once in a while. That backup person should be someone you can trust to do everything you’d need and really understands not just policies and procedures but how social media works. Make this is a priority, because that’s the only way I’ve learned to escape the daily constraints.

One more thing: allow yourself to escape from the rigors of your job for just a little bit each day. For example, I turn my phone on airplane mode during my run, so I don’t get texts, calls or emails. Those little spans of time will keep you from burning out as quickly.