Brain Waves Blog

As a social media manager, understanding copyright is a critical component of your content creation process. And it can definitely be confusing, especially if you have multiple accounts to manage in addition to all of the other aspects of your job.

At Campus Sonar, our humans set us apart. Our experience researching and analyzing the nuances of online conversation means we understand how to measure the effectiveness of your content. We know how to analyze who sees your content and understand how that’s impacted by each platform. When you develop social media strategy and create corresponding campaigns, this is ultimately what you need to measure to show success, right? The effectiveness of your campaign. If it worked.

I’ve never met a marketer who would tell you their department is fully funded and adequately staffed. Marketing is just one of those wishy-washy, nebulous concepts that can be extremely difficult to grasp unless you’re involved in the day-to-day work these professionals tackle. In higher education in particular, it’s easy for marketers and communicators to feel slighted, like our work is often overlooked and first on the chopping block when the time comes for difficult budgetary decisions. It’s common to celebrate admissions and development staff during times of high revenue—but institutions tend to forget about the communications pros who plan, create, and deliver key messages for those offices. And that’s a mistake. 

It’s a common illusion that a campus social media presence doesn’t cost anything. I’m here to tell you not to fall prey to that illusion, and explain what’s involved in building and staffing a higher ed social media team (including costs) so you know what you need to get started or get leadership support your need for additional resources. This post, along with two additional posts publishing in April and May, are excerpts from Fundamentals of Social Media Strategy.

I'm well aware that this post is being published as campuses consider furloughs and layoffs. Please don't dismiss it as something to think about "when things get back to normal." Staffing your social media team is more important now than ever.

I've given many presentations on Reddit over the last few years and after many of them, an attendee will privately come up after and ask a question I’ve become used to fielding. It usually goes something like this.

Crises happen. The ripples are felt in-person and online. While talking to every person affected would be helpful, it is not realistic. Social listening, however, gives campuses instant access to online conversations about a particular crisis as they emerge on social sites, in forums, on blogs, in the news, and on other websites. Furthermore, social listening allows for unique views into trends within those conversations as the crisis unfolds in real time. All in all, social listening puts campuses in a better position to plan or adjust crisis communication strategies in the moment based on emerging insights. But this is only effective with human analysts teaming up with technology to write the perfect query and easily visualize the data. 

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