Tyler Thomas, Social Media & Content Manager at University of Nebraska, is one of the 12 presenters of the 4th Higher Ed Social Media Conference.
In this 3-question interview, Tyler tells us a success story, shares the most difficult parts of the job and discusses the required skills to thrive as a higher ed social media pro.
1) What’s your best social media success story?
Our best success story over the past 12 months was securing an enterprise level social media management and listening platform for our entire University System. After 6-months of working across the four campuses in our system, we were able to identify, test and launch a new social media tool that allows each of us to leverage the latest technology to reach our individual goals, support our campuses and share in the total cost.
2) What are the 2 most difficult parts of your social media job and how do you deal with them?
Discovering what content best resonates with our varied audiences and figuring out how to leverage different platforms to deliver the content and accomplish our goals.
We’ve found that mixing up our team and adding members from different disciplines (design, news, photography and video) allows us to think in new ways and execute types content we haven’t tried before.
Pairing the new types of content with workflows to measure and quickly evaluate success has allowed us to discover what is working and what is not and pivot from there.
Our current strategy requires a lot of attention to detail and constant communication, but the end product and ROI has made it worth it.
Our social media team consists of one full-time staff member (me) and a handful of student interns and graduate assistants. Being connected 24/7 is a requirement of the job. It’s also debilitating at times. Social doesn’t sleep, I’ve found that I have to.
To make sure I can keep my eyes on everything 24/7, I’ve set specific alarms in my email, phone and other social toolbox to alert me if things happen in the “out of office hours.” It’s not perfect, but being able to get a notification, quickly evaluate and decide if it needs immediate action or can wait, has helped cut down on anxiety and has allowed me to be less connected.
3) What are the 2 most important skills to thrive as a social media pro in higher ed?
I believe writing is key to social media success. You have to have a great foundation in the rules of good writing, grammar and editing and then understand where you can break those rules to make it work on social. I can teach you to speak emoji, train you to be fluent in filters, help you select a hashtag or decipher an analytics report, I don’t have time to teach you to write well for social media or the Web.
Building relationships and connections across campus has been crucial in my social media success. Knowing who to contact to answer questions you get on Twitter or knowing who to collaborate with to help cover an event or promote a campaign has been instrumental in making social media a success on our campus.
As a social media manager, I am not a designer, videographer or web developer by trade, but I have connections that are. I’ve been able to leverage these relationships to create and deliver relevant and engaging content. Often times the content was already created, I just was able to repackage it because of my relationship with the original content creator. No matter if you are a writer, videographer, photographer, strategist or developer, your social media presence can be successful if you can build and leverage relationships to get things done.
Follow Tyler Thomas for a day at work on Instagram!
You’re going to love Higher Ed Experts’ #HESM Instagram Takeovers where your higher ed social media colleagues share a day in their life.
Check out Tyler’s 1-day takeover of Higher Ed Experts’ brand new Instagram account.
A conference for Higher Ed Social Media pros & teams?
The HESM conference has become a must-attend event for social media teams in higher education looking for new ideas and best practices.
Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Social Media Conference say about the event.