Web Strategy and Development Blog

Social Media Campaign Best Practices

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Our office is often asked for guidance and assistance with social media campaigns. Since we often receive questions on how best to begin a social media campaign, I thought it would be helpful to share a list of best practices.

Below you will find key points for achieving the goals of strengthening your web presence, leveraging your existing channels of communication, and connecting your campaign to real world events. While all of the practices below do not apply to everyone, there are many important factors to keep in mind if you are planning on running a social media campaign, and most of these issues apply to your general use of social media as well.

Strengthen your web presence

  • Develop a precise brand (and never, ever stray away from it)
    • Establish a title for your campaign that is used consistently in all materials
    • Create consistent imagery and graphics
    • Create a simple statement of your goals
      • Focus on the benefits to your audience
      • Encourage and reward participation
  • Create a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
    • Include your branding imagery and a short informational description that also encourages fans to like/follow/etc. your social media presence
    • Post all updates and news to your social media presence
      • Include status updates, photos, videos, etc.
      • Post at least twice a week at a minimum
    • Share the burden of posting content with others in your area
    • Schedule a series of unique posts and contests to help generate user-submitted content
    • Schedule a monthly feature article that is more significant than a typical status update
    • Create a Twibbon for fans to overlay on their profile picture on Facebook and Twitter
  • Create a simple website that is used as a hub of information
    • Include widgets, buttons, and links back to your social media presence(s)

Leverage existing channels of communication

  • Work with others on campus to help promote your campaign
    • Find other offices or departments who have a shared interest in the successful outcome of your campaign
    • Request others include ads, widgets, links, etc. from their websites and social media presences pointing back to your campaign
    • Request others to make periodical status updates on their social media presences to help promote your campaign
  • Include advertisements and promotions for your campaign in offline media
    • Include ads for your campaign in any publication materials like magazines, newsletters, etc. produced by you or others who have a vested interest
  • Share major updates with anyone external to the University that has a significant social media presence to assist with content going viral

Connect campaign with real world events

  • Use an event as a launching pad for the campaign
    • Have promotional material on hand to distribute
    • Collect contacts by having prize drawings with peoples’ names and email addresses written down on raffle tickets
  • Add events to a Facebook Page to connect your social media presence with real world events

Share your recommendations

Did I forget something? If you have other recommendations, please share them in the comments below.

Technology to Power a Hiking Blog

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Today is my first day back on the job after a 4 1/2 month leave to hike the Continental Divide Trail. Crazy as this sounds, it is my third major trail to hike. I’ve always kept an online journal when hiking, but in the past I had to mail or email journal entries to someone else for posting. Pictures took even longer as I had to mail camera memory cards back and forth. Technology finally has gotten to the place where I was able to completely post and manage my blog and pictures while hiking.

Requirements

First the solution had to be light. I’m an ultralight hiker so weight is a big deal. Maybe that’s an understatement; weight is almost everything. I’m concerned about fractions of an ounce. So the solution can’t be a satellite phone, laptop, tablet or anything that weighs more than a small paper notebook and pencil. That really makes it tough. Also, while I don’t post every day, I need to be able to post from towns without requiring a full computer hookup either.

The Blog

I switched to using Word Press to power my blog. I developed a custom theme that lets me use geotagged posts to show my current location on a map. I created a category for each of my hikes and used a specific template for each category to customize which map displayed. The hardest part was going back to all my old posts and geotagging the location. That took a bit. With the location attached to a post, now followers can match up what I’m talking about to both a specific area of the country as well as my overall progress on the hike. Really cool.

I also wanted people to follow along on Facebook. While I might personally think Facebook is evil, I had to recognize that the rest of the world lives by it. I keep my Facebook profile pretty locked down so that wasn’t going to be very helpful. Instead I created a Facebook page as an athlete using my trail name. Perfect! Now people could like the page and I didn’t have to approve the request.

Pictures

Text based blog entries are one thing, but how to manage the pictures? I already had a lot of my personal photos on Flickr, so naturally I wanted to keep my hike photos there as well. I simply created a set for each hike. For the blog home page, I used JQuery to pull in the latest photos from my Continental Divide Trail set as a rotating slideshow on the homepage.

Uploading the Content

I have carried a cell phone on all my hikes. So now my cell phone became multi-use gear and also was my journal entry device. Thankfully, smartphone keyboards and auto prediction have come a long way and the typing was tolerable. I use an Android phone which has a native Word Press application. Handily, the Word Press application for the phone will automatically geotag the post. All I had to do was put the post in the correct category.

Photos are a different matter. Most of the time the trail took me through the middle of nowhere (by design). Even in town I was lucky to have cell service, much less a 3g connection. However in every town I was able to find WiFi somewhere. That’s great because uploading a 2Mb photo over a slow data connection is just painful. There are several Flickr related applications for Android phones but the one I had the best luck with was Flickroid. The big hurdle became getting the pictures off of my camera onto my phone. Thankfully most Android phones use mini-SD cards for external storage and so does my camera. I simply rebooted my phone with the camera memory card installed and had access to all the photos.

Social Media

In addition to Facebook, I used Foursquare to check in to the towns as I went. I would check in as soon as I arrived while my blog entries and photos usually had to wait until later in the day to get posted. I used the private RSS feeds for Foursquare to feed them into Facebook as a status update. My followers really like the quick status update just so they could see that I was making progress. I also fed both the blog entries and Foursquare into twitter so people could also follow along there.

The biggest downfall of all of the social media was that I had to monitor comments everywhere. You could comment on the blog itself, Facebook or Foursquare.

Activity Streams

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One of the key components of the Missouri State website redesign is the new Activity Stream. It’s featured on both the Missouri State homepage and Current Students page. The activity stream combines content feeds from various campus providers – University Relations, Public Affairs, SGA, Athletics, SAC and the Bookstore to name just a few.

Not only does it pull in content from many different providers, it also pulls in content from different services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and various RSS feeds. This makes for a very dynamic and constantly changing stream of information.

Activity Stream

Here’s how it works:

  • Only one item is pulled per source every 30 minutes. This is to ensure that one content provider doesn’t overload the stream by posting a lot of content in a very short amount of time.
  • If content is posted on multiple sites it will only show the first entry. For example, if a link is posted on the Missouri State Facebook page and then the Missouri State Twitter account, only the first post from Facebook will show on the stream. This helps to reduce duplicated entries.
  • Only the 15 most recent items appear on the homepage (the 13 most recent appear on the current students page), but older items can be viewed by visiting the Full Stream, which shows the 100 most recent items.
  • From Facebook, only manual updates are pulled into the stream; this means that anything posted by an application (like Notes, RSS Graffiti, Twitter, etc.) does not appear. For content posted to Twitter, the stream ignores any items posted from Facebook, Twitterfeed and the Twitter Tools plugin on Missouri State blogs.

Some best practices you should be following when posting your content:

  • Don’t post a lot of content at once. There’s no need to post six months worth of events in the span of five minutes. Not only is this an ineffective way to promote your content, it also has the potential to alienate your followers, who will relate such activity with spam. Space out your content postings as much as you can, and if you do have more than one piece of content you need to post at the same time, wait at least 30 minutes to do so to ensure that all of the items appear on the activity stream.
  • Use tools that minimize copying and pasting your content into different sources. You should only need to post your update in one place, and then by setting up the correct tools, your content will disseminate automatically to your other accounts. Some great examples of these tools are the Facebook to Twitter option available to Facebook page administrators, or Twitterfeed for Twitter users. Last fall I presented on RSS and Social Media Coordination, and if you would like to see more of these tools in action I suggest you watch this video presentation. Not only does this coordination between your sites make the workload easier on you, it also streamlines how that content comes into the activity stream and helps reduce the possibilities of content duplication.
  • Similarly with blogs, take advantage of having notifications of new blog posts sent automatically to Facebook, using an application like Notes or RSS Graffiti, and Twitter using the Twitter Tools plugin available on Missouri State blogs.
  • When retweeting others’ content on Twitter, use the new retweet feature and do not put “RT” in front of the tweet. This will ensure that if you are retweeting content from another provider on the activity stream, that tweet will not be duplicated.

Features to be added in the future:

  • We will be adding an RSS feed of all the content from the activity stream, so users can subscribe to the feed and keep up to date with everything happening on campus without having to visit the website to see all the content from the activity stream.
  • We will be integrating a Like button on all activity stream content sourced from Facebook. At present you can see how many people like Facebook content, but once this button is added users will be able to like content without leaving the Missouri State website.
  • The full stream page will eventually go away and will be replaced with an expanding homepage that will show older content on the same page – similar to how the news stream works on Facebook. This will allow users to see older content without going to a different page.
  • There will be a button added that allows others in the campus community to submit their content sources to be added to the stream. For content to be considered for the homepage, it must have at least two audiences. For content to be considered for the current student page, the content must be relevant to current students.

Nate Bassett Recognized as Student Employee of the Month

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Congratulations to Nate Bassett, Online Writer/Editor from the Office of Web and New Media, who was selected as University Relations Student Employee of the Month.

Nate Bassett

Nate was recognized for creating our new Support web site and the pages related to it. During the months of October and November 2009, Nate built 10 new websites for social media and new media support, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and blogs.

During this same period, Nate also produced new current student-oriented videos that have garnered many positive comments from others on campus. Here are two examples of videos that Nate has recently produced:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZRqSJJ7Yek

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJXr9eGUOZg

Please help me congratulate Nate on this much deserved recognition.