Social Media Content: Plan It or Wing It?
In social media, plan too far in advance, and you may find yourself unable to use content due to those “things” that come up. Don’t plan at all, and miss great opportunities to take advantage of what happens on campus.
Since starting my position, I’ve found that planning specific pieces in advance allows me to ease the stress of having a completely blank schedule each semester while still allowing me the flexibility to listen to my audiences and help create content that resonates with them.
Now, I know you’ve read this far and you are wondering: “okay, so she plans ahead but only so far. How is that any different than anything or anyone else?”
Evergreen Social Media Campaigns 101
The key to the content that my staff and I create is that we work to design campaigns that are centered around durable content that can be housed and shared on multiple platforms. These pieces can be posted over extended periods of times while still maintaining their relevance.
How do we do it?
We spend a few hours before each semester begins designing and creating campaigns with a little more breadth and depth.
We talk about how we can use these campaigns on each platform and how the content ties back to our overall goals for the platforms. Yes, we like the “safety” that comes with these type of campaigns, but there is no reason to compromise the integrity of the different platforms just for a little bit of a break.
3 Successful Examples of Durable Social Media Content
Below are three examples of campaigns that we have found to have high engagement rate throughout their life span on the various different platforms.
Disclaimer: just because these campaigns work well for our audiences, y no means am I saying that these are the only campaigns that will work for other universities. The key to creating any campaign is understanding what resonates with your audiences.
Text Overlays
I used the title text overlays very vaguely, as how we’ve used them in campaigns has been pretty specific. Essentially, we take awesome pictures shot by our photographer and put simple text over them. My previous supervisor and I started the first “Summer in Marquette” album last summer and it had such a great reaction, we expanded it.
Inspirational quotes
I’m a total sucker for quotes so I am definitely a little biased when it comes to the practicality and use of these pieces.
However, what we originally created as a Pinterest and Twitter piece has turned into an awesome addition to both our Facebook and Instagram accounts as well! Apparently, quotes are a lot more acceptable on different platforms than I had ever really realized.
The quotes featured above were originally created under our previous branding structure, so they focus around the idea of “fearless”. However, we’ve got some more in the works that reflect the different direction we’ve recently taken.
Cover Photos
Cover photos are awesome to use as durable pieces, because they are so unique to social media.
When people take the time to download your cover photos and use them on their profiles, you know your university has had an impact on their life.
3 Tips to Plan Durable Social Media Content in Higher Education
Overall, creating durable content ahead of time is something that anyone can easily do with their own staff.
Here are my tips to incorporating this type of social media content into your own schedule:
- Plan your campaigns ahead of time to allow yourself the time to make the content, and make it well.
- Create content that is going to resonate with your audiences.
- Be ready to abandon ship. If the first few posts of your content don’t go over as well as you had hoped, it is okay to scrap your ideas.
For example, we thought it would be great to make calendars promoting 3 home sports games of our athletics teams and share them across all of our platforms.
We were wrong: the response we received via Facebook was mediocre at best.
Why? We manage the official university accounts and they have absolutely NO ties to the official athletics accounts. Had these pieces originated from the athletics accounts, things might have been different.
We learned a good lesson in a not so scary way, because the social media team was really the only one affected by the scrapping of this idea. Things don’t go as well as planned – so what?
Being in social media means we must be able to learn and adapt to change.
If we cannot adapt and listen to the reactions of our audiences to subpar content, we won’t be able to create more engaging content in the future.
So, take the plunge and start (or keep) creating social media content based on durability and cross-platform functionality — and don’t forget to tell me (in the comments!) about it if you do.
Meet the Author: Emily Stulz
Emily Stulz is the Marketing Coordinator at Northern Michigan University. She is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program in Social Media Measurement for Higher Ed
Tags: Higher Ed Marketing Memos, Higher Ed News