In this 4-question interview,Lindsay tells us about an exciting content project, a favorite tool, the place of SEO and shares a cool video with us.
1) What is the most exciting content project you’ve worked on over the past year?
Probably one of the most fun was creating a basketball commercial for our men’s and women’s teams. We had a televised game coming up (rare for a DII school) and needed a commercial to air during it. We wanted to use a high-end montage-type piece we had made two years ago, and just refresh it with some new basketball footage – and then decided to go ahead and make a specific basketball commercial since we’d have it anyways. We worked with James Drake Films out of Denver, who is always so creative and professional. To make the scene look appropriately dramatic, we blacked out the gym, filled it with fog, and used spotlights and drones to finish it out. As a final touch, James requested commentary pulled from a real game to flesh out the audio. Here’s the final piece .
2) What is your favorite tool to use when working on content projects?
I find Onlypult to be a lifesaver. As far as I know, it’s the only Instagram scheduling tool that allows total pre-scheduling – not a notification sent to a phone to finish out the post, but pure automatic posting. In the last year or so, we’ve switched our Instagram presence to almost completely reposts – students use our #fortlewiscollege hashtag and we choose the best to represent campus. Onlypult allows us to search on the hashtag, regram the posts, and schedule them weeks in advance.
3) What is the place of search engine optimization in your content creation and distribution process?
SEO doesn’t drive everything on the social media, but it is something we keep in the back of our minds. We double post all Facebook content to Google+ to capitalize on Google’s capabilities, always fill out YouTube descriptions, and tag our news stories to the best of our ability.
4) Video has become a key format. Can you share the most successful video produced at your school?
This is a classic example of viral content heavily outperforming created content – it comes down to paying attention to great moments and giving them the ability to spread. In a recent basketball game, our 5’8” guard stuffed a 6’8” post going up for a layup. Our Public Affairs Officer, who was filming the game for the live stream, saw the potential for this quick play and cut it into a 30 second clip with a slo-mo version. We all pitched in to tweet it to ESPN’s SportCenter as a Top 10 Play, who picked it up and featured it on their Twitter and Instagram. Our YouTube of the event now has over 22,000 views, which dwarfs just about everything else we’ve ever done. Sportscenter’s social media got over 6K retweets, 14K+ likes, and one million views on Instagram.
A conference focusing on content strategy & practices in higher ed?
The HECO conference has become a must-attend event for marketing and communication professionals in higher education looking for new ideas and best practices for content creation, management and distribution..
Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Content Conference say about the event.