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Public Affairs Conference 2016 Digital Recap

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The 2016 Public Affairs Conference centered on health-related topics, but not just of the physical variety. The conference theme — Building Healthy Communities: Mind, Body and Spirit — encompassed the annual four-day event featuring keynote presentations, panel discussions and special events on the Springfield campus of Missouri State University.

Digital promotion of the Public Affairs Conference

To promote the event, Web and New Media partnered and engaged with Conference representatives and social media accounts across the university. These strategies included the development of a social media kit and strategic live social media posts.

New content

We generated a different and supplementary approach to digital promotions and produced a series of five public affairs blog posts.

Public Affairs pages on MissouriState.edu

The most popular page was the conference schedule, which was viewed 3,840 times, a marginal increase over the 2015 conference. Total page views were down slightly, and other figures were statistically similar to the results from 2015.

  • 14,014 total page views
  • 10,914 unique page views
  • 91 seconds average time on pages
  • 39.48 percent bounce rate

Where the traffic came from — the top five sources

  • 2,363 sessions from the MissouriState.edu homepage feature
  • 969 from the MissouriState.edu homepage featurettes
  • 641 from MSU Mobile
  • 424 from Missouri State Facebook
  • 332 from Missouri State Twitter

Livestream

Plenary sessions from Peter Gray and Paul Thomlinson are available on Livestream. Viewers have watched Gray’s session 166 times and Thomlinson’s 164 times. About 25 people watched each session live.

Social media kit

The Public Affairs Conference social media kit contained a variety of tools that assisted university departments and individuals in sharing their conference experiences. These items included:

  • Key details about the conference
  • Tips for social media-savvy posts
  • Promotion of the #CitizenBear hashtag
  • Shareable visual assets including video and images
  • Sample social media posts

Social media analytics

Using the Avanish Kaushik method of measuring social media success, Missouri State posts on the conference generated the following:

Missouri State Facebook (14 posts)

0.270 applause rate (Likes/Favorites)

0.007 conversation rate (Comments/Replies)

0.034 amplification rate (Shared/Retweeted)

0.464 conversion rate (Clicks to websites)

MarooNation Facebook (7)

0.321 applause rate

0.016 conversation rate

0.144 amplification rate

0.785 conversion rate

Missouri State Twitter (31)

0.933 applause rate

0.056 conversation rate

0.262 amplification rate

0.340 conversion rate

MarooNation Twitter (6)

1.636 applause rate

0 conversation rate

0.613 amplification rate

1.125 conversion rate

Missouri State Instagram (2)

39.685 applause rate

0.048 conversation rate

Missouri State LinkedIn Co. (2)

0.408 applause rate

0 conversation rate

0.664 conversion rate

Missouri State LinkedIn Edu (1)

0.323 applause rate

0 conversation rate

0.351 conversion rate

MarooNation LinkedIn (1)

0.217 applause rate

0 conversation rate

1.304 conversion rate

Social media post highlights

A pair of tweets about Jillian Michaels’ keynote address at JQH Arena drew the biggest engagement rates on Twitter (9.7 percent and 8.2 percent). Those tweets actually served as bookends for her speech. The first introduced her and the second chronicled her closing thought.

One of the most visually striking events of the conference was the Field of Memories. The 1,100 flags planted at the North Mall served to represent the 1,100 students who die by suicide each year on college campuses.