Rethinking Social Media Strategy: Should You Manage Your Accounts All in One Place?
An active social media presence is a vital part of your school’s marketing strategy. According to an EAB survey of over 9,000 high school students, 86.1 percent said "every college or university should have a social media presence." And roughly a quarter of them said that they "discovered" a college directly through social media use (source).
Of course, most schools know how critical a social media presence is—and are actively maintaining one. Yet, it can be a challenge to know when you should have your social media account (or accounts) managed in a single place (usually the marketing or admissions office) or have multiple accounts that are managed by various offices across campus.
Maybe you use multiple social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn simultaneously. If they are all managed in one place and directed to a general audience (e.g. the entire community connected with the school), then we’ll consider this to be an aggregated social media strategy. However, you may also have a Facebook account managed by the alumni office, an Instagram account managed by Athletics, and so on. We’ll consider that to be a multi-account social media strategy.
Each strategy has its pros and cons, so it will depend on certain factors to determine the best approach for your school. A good rule of thumb for smaller schools: too many accounts across campus can quickly become unwieldy, and do more harm than good.
Below are some things to consider when deciding which social media strategy is the best option for your school.
Who Are the Right People to Manage Your Accounts?
This should be your first question. It might make sense to have a separate account featuring athletic news and another featuring application due dates, for example. It’s important, though, to make sure you identify individuals on campus who can manage these accounts outside of marketing/admissions. This means finding individuals who agree to take official responsibility for them, with the capacity to devote an adequate amount of time to them.
Who will be sharing content?
Do they have the skillset needed, like strong writing skills and familiarity with technical tools
How often will they be posting and what type of content will it be?
Will they be using a platform like Sprout Social?
Do they have a good sense of what type of content is relevant to their specific audience?
If you feel confident that another area on campus can manage the responsibilities associated with an account, then go for it! Having a separate account for a specific audience segment provides targeted content and be more relevant to the audience. There is value in focused messages such as admissions info for prospective students and upcoming social events for alumni.
Biola University, in addition to its main Facebook account, also has a School of Education account. This allows the school to tailor content especially for those members of the community interested in education and teaching. This content wouldn't be relevant to most people if posted on the main university account, but in this focused context, it is quite valuable to a specific segment.
However, if you don’t have the resources to manage targeted accounts, or if your intended audience is too small and fragmented, a multi-account strategy won’t work well. It’s better in this case to stick with a primary social media account for your school that can be managed in one place.
Ensuring Brand Oversight for All Accounts
It’s important that content shared on all school-affiliated social media accounts is both brand-aligned and relevant to your audiences. Usually, it falls on the marketing office to make sure account managers on campus are aware of the brand and social media best practices.
A helpful resource for campus-wide consistency is a brand and social media institutional guide. Wheaton College Massachusetts provides a Brand toolkit, editorial guidelines, social media policies, and more. They offer tips on how to share content, what type of content to share (and not to share), and how to ensure the copy and visuals align with their brand.
Brand oversight could include scheduling monthly or quarterly meetings with all social media account managers across campus to brainstorm ideas and ensure consistency. Or it could entail crafting a comprehensive social media calendar that contributors follow, whereby you can easily monitor all planned content.
There are a number of ways to build in oversight for the social media accounts affiliated with your school. The key is to make sure the approach you implement (whether it’s a calendar or regular training) is practical. If you can’t do this with a reasonable amount of effort and time, then it might not be worth having multiple accounts managed outside the marketing/admissions office.
Note: One drawback to centralized social media account management is that your content may not be as nuanced for specific audiences. But in the long run, that is better than having multiple conflicting accounts that distort your school’s brand.
Making Sure You Have Something to Say
Even if you have the resources and the structures for providing oversight, ask yourself whether you really have enough content to share on multiple accounts.
If you have an account for alumni, would you only be sharing events sporadically over the year, or can you share alumni stories regularly on Facebook? If your MBA program has a Facebook page, can you share business-related articles, or insight from faculty on LinkedIn? For an athletics Instagram account, can you share short video clips of sporting events or interviews with student-athletes after the game? The key to having multiple social media accounts is to have a regular volume of unique and relevant content for a focused audience.
It’s important to make sure whoever is managing the account has:
A content plan
A method of obtaining that content
Content that is actually valuable to audiences.
Sometimes offices are eager to have a social media account because it’s the “thing to do.” But an account that’s not active, relevant, or engaging to an audience can be worse than not having one at all.
Pepperdine offers comprehensive instructions on how campus-wide contributors can get their content posted on the school’s main social media accounts. This is a great way to avoid rogue accounts and still give opportunities to share what’s going on across the school.
Measuring Your Audiences’ Engagement
In addition to ensuring social media content is branded, relevant to a given audience, and valuable, it needs to be aligned with business goals. The goal might simply be brand awareness, a larger social following, or more visitors to your website. But whatever the goals, they need to be clearly defined, recorded in writing, and measured for every account across campus.
Obviously, this becomes more difficult and time-intensive as you add more and more accounts. You’ll need to decide whether someone in your marketing office can do the measurement for all accounts on campus or if each area managing an account needs to do it themselves. In that case, you may need to spend time training them. For example, perhaps once a quarter someone in the marketing office meets with all account managers to measure success, redefine goals, and adopt better strategies for each account.
Your Strategy Checklist
To recap, maybe it’s time to rethink how you’re managing social media accounts. Here are some questions to consider:
Do you have the staff resources across campus to manage more than one account?
Who will be managing your other accounts (if not marketing/admissions)?
Do you have a process for ensuring that all social media accounts will be on-brand and follow best practices?
Do you have a process for ensuring that all social media accounts will regularly publish helpful and relevant content for their respective audiences?
Does each new account actually have a large enough audience to warrant a separate account? Or might you reach that audience through a general account?
Would it be better to develop a process for others on campus to submit content to the main accounts, instead of creating their own separate accounts?
How will you establish goals and measure the success of each account?
If you’re rethinking your social media strategy
and could use some more customized guidance, let’s talk.
