SOCIAL MEDIA
These people want answers to their questions and it’s their prerogative to decide which channel to use – whether you invite it or not, people will tweet you, post questions on your Facebook wall, comment on your YouTube videos, and share your content with their own opinions attached.
interacting with the person who posted it – it takes time, knowledge and care. Ultimately though, it’s about delivering proactive customer service in what is a crowded and competitive marketplace. Lancaster University is mentioned on the web hundreds
of times each day – and among these are enquiries from prospective students, parents and alumni on the other side of the world. These people want answers to their questions and it’s their prerogative to decide which channel to use – whether you invite it or not, people will tweet you, post questions on your Facebook wall, comment on your YouTube videos, and share your content with their own opinions attached. If you don’t embrace all of this organic interaction and join the conversation, then you’re missing a trick. Of course, conversations are often sparked as a
response to an update that we’ll post – about one of our research studies, for example – but often the engagement originates with the enquirer. To prospective students it’s a place to ask questions that previously would have gone unanswered – either because they didn’t warrant an email which might be seen as too ‘official’ or long- winded, or because there wasn’t a clear route of who they ought to contact. Twitter is seen by many as a ‘catch-all’ for everything and anything about our University, which is fine by me – anything that facilitates friendly and transparent engagement between the general public and a world-class academic institution like Lancaster can only be a good thing. One of the best devices to generate social debate is
the sharing of media content with those who ‘Like’ your Facebook page, as well as their friends. This is cost effective and incredibly easy to set up, thanks to recent developments in Facebook’s advertising platform. At Lancaster, we cross-link almost every media appearance that our academics make across our social media channels for maximum impact. Whether it’s a television interview, a radio piece or a newspaper article, social media allows us take the content and deliver it to a much wider audience, helping individual pieces of coverage to become campaigns in their own right, which then last much longer than the original few minutes of airtime or column inches. That said, social media is just one of several
communication channels that we embrace at Lancaster. It complements our face-to-face activities and other support channels, helping us to deliver great service at every touchpoint. The advantage that a university has, when compared to a retailer for example, is the quality of its content – as a university that is ranked in the global top 1%, Lancaster benefits from multiple high profile research pieces, regular international events and a powerful alumni community, providing us with a wealth of high quality content updates that articulate our academic endeavours and world-class research output.
Global reach One of the biggest challenges when using social media within a higher education institution like Lancaster though is that we have to make our updates suitable for multiple audience groups – from prudent high school students to seventy year-old accomplished business leaders who graduated in the sixties. Coupled with the fact that we attract students from across the world (we have alumni in 138 countries), this means that we have a hugely diverse digital community consuming our updates and sharing our content. For that reason, it’s always best to: • Avoid using colloquialisms – they don’t always translate well to international audiences.
• Be sensitive to different cultures and religions – you may be based in the UK, but social media gives your brand a global reach.
• Don’t focus too much on events happening on campus or at your main centre – it’s a good idea to research the locations of your social connections so that you can be clear about which demographics you’re talking to.
• Prioritise accordingly – if ten tweets come in at once, whoever is at the helm needs to know which to answer first. For that’s reason, it’s important for engagement executives to understand wider organisational goals.
It might be a learning curve, but social media is a powerful tool if you get it right. Tweet your thoughts to @russellreader
Top tips for effective digital engagement: • Remember that it takes time for engagement officers to build up the knowledge and judgment that’s required to be able to quickly decide how best to respond to an enquiry – don’t expect team members to be able to be able to make the switch to social media overnight, especially those colleagues who are used to more traditional communication methods and don’t use social media in a personal capacity.
• Engagement officers must therefore be sufficiently senior and have a broad understanding of an organisation’s affairs, in order to be able to give answers which are meaningful.
• Don’t be easily offended – people often use social media to vent frustration at an organisation. It’s just the way it is – perhaps it’s raining and they can’t find a parking space, or the Wi-Fi isn’t working for them – either way, they might use fruity language in their tweet. Just remember that people are tweeting the organisation, and not you!
• Because social media is a real-time channel, you can afford to be a little more informal and lighthearted in your tone. Most people appreciate a friendly tone-of-voice, and this is even more important when you’re engaging with younger audiences.
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