NAU Social Recap: March 2017
Spring into action
Spring = spring cleaning. We’re taking this opportunity to refresh our social media profiles and give our audience new perspectives.
We’re also reviewing what we’ve done so far and looking at patterns we see emerging. Our most popular content comes from staying on top of trends and being in the moment.
How can you do a “refresh” to your social media approach and create truly compelling content? By planning and being present to provide a good mix of real- time action vs perfectly curated content.
One of the easiest ways to garner excitement is through events. Three of the primary reasons people engage with social media are:
- Holidays
- Events
- Trends
By creating these social media posts, you’ll stay relevant and spike your customer interest.
Celebrate holidays
At the risk of stating the obvious, marketing revolves around holidays: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Halloween, Presidents Day, etc.
A strategic way to increase engagement during this times is to augment your holiday promotions with original content that celebrates the holiday. For example, this month NAU celebrated St. Paddy’s Day!
Video Updates
As we discussed last month, video consumption is on the rise and will continue to grow. The question now is not should you be sharing video — it’s in what format should you be doing so?
Square vs Landscape
Traditionally, videos have been made in the landscape mode. New research, however, indicates that the preferences among video formats and engagement by type may be changing.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Square video (1:1) takes up 78% more real estate in a person’s mobile newsfeed than landscape video (16:9).
- In some cases, square video resulted in 30–35% higher video views and an 80–100% increase in engagement.
- It costs 7.5% less to get someone to engage with square video on Facebook and a whopping 33% less to get someone to engage with square video on Instagram.
Facebook: Mastering the art of the share
60,698 likes (+579), 1,668,829 monthly reach
Even though March 20th officially marked the end of winter, Flagstaff didn’t seem to get the idea. Spring decided to gift us with a few snow storms, which made #MyNAUView a gorgeous site to see.
Updates
Reactions: Now Facebook says that reactions will, indeed, now be worth more than a like:
“Over the past year we’ve found that if people leave a Reaction on a post, it is an even stronger signal that they’d want to see that type of post than if they left a Like on the post. So we are updating News Feed to weigh reactions a little more than Likes when taking into account how relevant the story is to each person.”
Split Testing: On March, 23 Facebook introduced split-testing for ads. This will allow us to run controlled tests of different components, such as age, gender, or location, without audience overlap.
What does this mean for businesses on Facebook?
In short, getting fans to react to your posts just got that bit more important. Reactions should hopefully generate improved reach for your posts. How to get the most reactions? Look at the type of content you’re putting out there.
More so, identifying your audience(s) and being able to engage with them individually will mean maximizing success.
Video posts + reactions could be where the most striking benefits are to be found.
30,215 followers (+534), 1,680,000 impressions, 1,014 mentions
Keep on tweeting on. While many have written about “Twitter’s death,” our following on the platform continues to grow. This month, we reached 30,000 followers.
We not only continue to create conversations and share real-time events, we also get the word out.
From the surface level, it looks like a tweet that did ok. However, when you look at the analytics and the clicks from the post, you’ll see that our two posts about the event garnered over 600 clicks. So while Twitter may be dying in other areas, it continues to remain high on our engagement and visibility list.
Spring on: To help with the spring cleaning Twitter has compiled a listing of the most commonly tweeted hashtags and topics. We’ll be adding our spin to the trends and evaluating which ones we can adopt into our efforts here at NAU Social.
27,705 followers (+454), 56,566 likes this month
Influencer marketing focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. NAU social utilizes our student population, NAZ businesses, and departments on campus to build our content and increase our reach.
With Instagram’s growing popularity, comes the potential to tap into advertising.What does this mean for social? It means that we have to be as strategic as possible and optimize our ads to compete with the bigger market.
Instagram’s three tips are:
- “The community rallies around passions” —Instagram has always been an aspirational network, a place you go to see things you want, where you’d like to be, what you’d like to wear. Working that into your strategy can be a great way to boost audience response.
- “Simplicity Matters” — Instagram notes that video editing tools like Boomerang and Hyperlapse can help brands develop simple, effective content that stands out in the feed. Keep your images focused on specific items/products and ensure the messaging is clear.
- “Visible Action” —Instagram is all about the visuals. If you want your content to be seen, put effort into making it stand out. Make people want to see it.
Snapchat
4000+ followers
Snapchat Takeover — with close to 200 million users, Snapchat is becoming the go-to platform for companies and organizations to increase brand awareness and target younger, engaged audiences. For us, we utilize Snapchat as an inside look to what is happening on campus and all things NAU. One of the way’s we do that is through our Lumberjack Takeovers.
Every Thursday, we hand off our account to a different Lumberjack for an insider look at life at NAU. Our first semester on Snapchat, we handpicked Jacks we knew. This semester, we’ve opened it up with an application system allowing greater campus involvement.
A Look Back, A Look Ahead
March allowed us to spring clean and start fresh after spring break. With only a few weeks left of the semester, it’s time to get started on planning our coverage for finals week, commencement, and #NAUSummer!
— Team Social
P.S. — Waiting for summer like…
