In this 3-question interview, Dominique tells us how he manages social media, shares a surprising social media outcome and tackles the tough ROI question.
1) How do you manage your activity on social media?
Tools like Hootsuite make life so much easier! Having all that I do (i.e. publishing, monitoring, analyzing) on one dashboard goes a long way toward achieving a sense of structure and routine in this crazy world that is social media. Also, between the never-ending stream of content coming from all corners of the university and the need to keep an eye on engagement on all of our social channels, it helps to have a single place that allows me to be everywhere at once.
2) What’s the most surprising social media outcome you’ve experienced this year? What did you learn?
Like many people, I was hesitant to jump on the Periscope bandwagon, but our initial experiments with the platform garnered a surprising level of engagement. Without any kind of promotion, more than 200 people tuned in to watch one of our first live scopes. It was especially interesting to watch the comments and hearts coming in from the live audience. It was then that I began to understand, from the viewers’ perspective, the appeal of engaging with content creators in real-time and how we might be able to capitalize on that for future ‘scopes.
3) How do you approach the question of return on investment (ROI) when it comes to social media?
As I see it, return on investment always comes down to how and to what extent I advance institutional goals. In that regard, I think it helps to identify success metrics that can be easily measured and easily understood. As social media managers, it’s easy for us to get caught up in follower counts and engagement rates because we look at them all the time.
The challenge is to try to look past ‘likes’, ‘hearts’ and follower counts to the numbers that are important to the people who matter most. Click-through rates, potential reach and hashtag mentions can all be great success metrics. When it comes to proving the value of social media work, I think there is nothing that speaks louder than a single, measureable result.
