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Section 4: Social Media Best Practices

When maintaining an institution sponsored account please utilize these guidelines as best practices as often as possible.

Presence and Maintenance

  • Social media accounts at Berea College must be logged into a minimum of once per day to monitor and respond to posts, comments, mentions, etc.
  • Be present and responsive. Having an official social media account at Berea requires diligent maintenance and upkeep, including answering users’ questions and monitoring comments. Establishing and then abandoning or not regularly checking a social media channel is not allowed.
  • Frequency of updates varies for each channel. Use an editorial calendar to schedule content creation (and subsequent publication) more efficiently. Don’t hoard content and post it all at once.
    • You may consider giving multiple people in your department access to post if you feel that will help the accounts remain more up-to-date.

Measurement and Analytics

  • Measurement and analytics are key to assessing your success in social media.
  • Study the data provided by the respective analytics functions in Hootsuite,  Facebook (Insights), Twitter (analytics.twitter.com) and YouTube (Insights). Determine relevant statistics and track them over time.
  • Match analytics information against content and engagement to determine what caused certain results.
  • Use this information to better understand your audience and to inform content decisions.

Community Building

  • Be personable and accessible, while keeping in mind the guidelines offered here. Having a personality and a voice will help you build your audience.
  • Once you have established your social media presence, cross-promote on your various channels, both online and offline. If you have a brochure or a website, drive people to your social media channels, and vice versa. Just because people are very active with your Twitter account doesn’t mean they don’t need a pamphlet or to visit your  website.
  • Don’t judge your success solely on numbers. While it is tempting to use views, fans or followers as a metric by which to assess your engagement in social media, it is not the ideal measurement. With social media, quality supersedes quantity. Every community is different. You may have fewer followers on Twitter, but if you are cultivating a highly-engaged community, the number of followers means little.
  • Success with building community via social media is not an end result; it is a process. You have to be present and engaged consistently over time, and you have to measure the effectiveness of that engagement over time.

Approved by Administrative Committee, January 2019