15 Things You Can Do with Social Media Right Now!
1. Explore social media sites and services you may not have heard of with the Conversation Prism. Created by Solis and Jesse Thomas of JESS3, this visual map will take you places you haven’t thought of yet—I use it often in my presentations.
2. Combine a push marketing approach such as email with a community building approach such as creating a Facebook page. This combination is the dirty little secret of the Obama social media campaign and the primary reason it worked so well. Check out Blue State Digital.
3. Work for quality followers on Twitter, not just followers. Take advantage of Twitter’s #followfriday, a day set aside for promoting people really worth following, to find the kind of followers who will really make a difference.
4. Use your analytics software to track where your social networks are driving community members. Goodwill, for example, discovered that one out of 14 people who read their DC Goodwill Fashionista blog clicked to ShopGoodwill.com.
5. Use an online news distribution service like PRWeb, which will distribute your press releases through Tweetlt, a service that will automatically tweet the release, and also connect them to social networks like LinkedIn.
6. Build an active social media presence on external and internal platforms to improve your Google rankings. Google loves fresh content and lots of backlinks—both byproducts of social media—and will love your site even more if you have plenty of both.
7. Host a tweetup—a local meeting among sets of followers—with prospective students and/or alumni. You can integrate these meetings into your recruiting calendar. You can also use tools like Xanga, a blogging service, and Yelp to do the same.
8. Use Fliqz to submit your viral/YouTube videos to search-engines, a process that is “53 times more likely to get you a first-page Google result…” according to Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne.
9. Establish several Twitter accounts to convey the breadth of your institution (e.g., athletics, student life, alumni, etc.), give your followers something worthwhile instead of talking about how your day is going, and broadcast fewer, more focused tweets rather than more (thank you Heather Mansfield: 10 Twitter Tips for Higher Education, 5/2009)
10. Make good use of Facebook Connect and start using this platform as a spot for your video and TV ads to land on at some point during their run…and learn to work—forge connections—through feeds.
11. Link all print collateral to your social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
12. Study the Stanford Facebook page. Study the Stanford Facebook page. Study the Stanford Facebook page.
13. Focus on consistency of how you present yourself instead of consistency of message: use the same photo on different networks and microblogs like Twitter to identify either your institution or your social media ambassadors; manage fewer but better external platforms instead of getting on as many as you can find; write fewer but consistently delivered blog posts rather than trying to post something every day, a strategy that usually fails for colleges and universities. (Big thanks to Mitch Joel at Twist Image)
14. Learn how to make good use of social media by reading both books and blogs (which are frequently more up-to-date): Chris Brogan, .eduguru, Beth’s Blog, College Web Editor, edVangelist, College Media Innovation Blog, David Armano, Jeremiah Owyang.
15. Use YouTube as a community-building tool, not just a space to watch videos. Thanks to recent adjustments to the platform, you can track what your friends are watching and what they are saying about what they are watching (which is even more important) through real-time streams (thanks to Esther Assaad.)
Photo by: dbarefoot
