NAU Social Recap: March 2018
Spring changes, spring cleaning
Spring = spring cleaning. We’re taking this opportunity to refresh our social media profiles and give our audience new perspectives.
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.
Promoting events and successfully reaching a large audience is possible with some planning and a little ingenuity. We created a guide to maximize live event coverage before, during, and after the action. Try out these tips and use your social accounts to their advantage!
Current mood
That’s exactly how we feel each time a social media network announces new changes — especially to the algorithm. If you’ve experienced declining reach — you’re not alone. It’s sad, but true — your posts are not being seen by as many people as it used to.
What can you do to still maintain your visibility?
Continue to create great content and do what you can to play into the current algorithm.
Interactions
Facebook’s new algorithm will favor “meaningful interactions.”
These include:
- Posts that are shared into Messenger and generate a group dialogue
- A person commenting on/liking another person’s photo or status update
- A person reacting to a post from a publisher that a friend shared.
- Longer comments are given more weight in the algorithm than shorter comments
- Multiple people replying to each other’s comments on a video or article
Taking all this into consideration — it’s not too different from our usual strategy — Create conversation, meaningful impact and community.
Here’s some of our top posts for the month:
How did it play into the interaction game?
Unless it’s a snow day, we’ve come to the conclusion that comments are harder to get than shares.
We’ll continue to tweak our strategy and utilize wording to help get people talking more — not less.
Word of caution— Holding contests on Facebook
Running a Facebook contest? Make sure you’re abiding by Facebook’s rules. If your contest doesn’t fit the rules, you can still promote it on Facebook but host the contest on another platform or site.
Less is more. Our top tweets consisted of shorter verbiage, gifs and captivating images.
Add your wit
On Twitter, let your personality and humor shine.
Check your stats
We say this every month — checking your stats helps you see what content is resonating in ways that RTs and likes don’t show.
Our Life in 5 Pics blog featuring Lumberjack Ari was one of our most clicked posts of the month.
Twitter updates
Scrolling through your Twitter and see a tweet you want to come back to later? Now there’s an easy way to do so — Twitter bookmarks.
Simply click on the post and select “Add Tweet to Bookmarks”
Handling multiple accounts? There’s a new rule that may affect you regarding creating multiple posts over multiple accounts from the same link.
This behavior may get you flagged for spamming
From the Twitter rules:
“If you post duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account, or create duplicate or substantially similar accounts.”
Just like Facebook, Instagram’s reach is changing.
Make yourself discoverable
Your bio holds the keys to discoverable content. Previously, only the link feature was clickable. Now, any accounts you include AND hashtags are clickable from your bio.
What does this mean for you?
— First, make sure any hashtags you include are ones you want to be a part of. Your featured hashtags act as curated content galleries. Use them regularly and continually monitor their usage and interact back (likes, comments).
— Are you collaborating with another club/department for an event? Refresh your bio for the week and link to their account.
Algorithm Tricks
Instagram takes EVERYTHING into account in its algorithm.
In particular, it looks at how frequently you post, what features you’re using and how people are engaging with you.
The more people that engage with your content, the more likely it is to be featured in other user feeds.
Lumberjack Tip: If your post engagement is down, expand your horizons and use other features such as Instagram Story or Instagram Live. In Instagram Story use poll stickers, gif stickers and #hashtag stickers as well. These are all ways to get into larger conversations and increase reach.
The algorithm takes into account all actions of engagement like replying to a Story or sending a Story to someone. The more engagement, the likelier your posts will show up in the feed.
New Instagram Features
- Type Mode for Stories — Create a story without any image or video.
- The ability to post Instagram Stories in all sizes and formats. Content will be stretched to fit the screen. Word of caution: Don’t take shortcuts. If the stretching will make your photo appear fuzzy, take the time to run your photo through an app like InShot.
Snapchat
Our most “real” platform has taken a hit.
Bad News: With the update to the Snapchat “home page” less people are watching our stories. Our view counts have significantly dropped.
Good news: Among those watching, our completion rate still remains high. Meaning we still have loyal and engaged users.
Experiencing the same problems? Mix up your content and don’t be afraid to repurpose. On our end, we’ll be using Instagram Story to drive users to our Snapchat stories. We plan to post mini- stories with CTA linking to our Snapchat. We’ll also use repurpose our content by uploading our stories to YouTube and sharing content in that manner as well.
Now that we’ve talked about Snapchat changes — let’s talk about our content. On Snapchat, we try to showcase the many aspects of life at NAU. This month, we were especially proud of the Takeovers we were able to coordinate. Among them: Life as an Admissions Officer: Sawyer Cook; Miss Indian NAU; KJACK Radio; HAPA Club; NAU Musical Theater major.
Our Takeovers continue to provide an authentic look into Lumberjack life and enable prospective and current students to get their questions answered from people who know best.
What’s next — The calm before graduation
Prepping for Commencement and sharing end of the semester projects, accolades and stories. It’s never a dull moment around campus.
— Team Social
