Are you a solo or small-team social media manager who supports a multi-unit higher-ed campus? To conquer the challenge of overseeing posts across multiple departments, you need to learn how to avoid the trap of social media overwhelm.
Fortunately, it’s more than possible to move from overwhelm to making a significant impact on your campus. In a recent presentation at the Social Media Strategies Summit for Higher Ed, Cait Kruszewski — the Communications Officer at Saint Mary’s University — shared how she streamlined her strategy to achieve institutional goals.
Conquer the Chaos
Kruszewski has a fair share of experience turning chaos into a smooth-running social media machine. As she puts it, her role at Saint Mary’s encompasses “everything from communication strategy to social media management, web content, copywriting, editing, data analysis, web development, mass communications, and more.” Oh, yes, and videography too.
That’s not all. Kruszewski’s office provides services to two departments, which encompass 16 service units. Even more challenging, her team consists of only herself and a student who works part-time at the office.
Working in the communications hub for student engagement and support, her responsibilities were massive. So was the ensuing chaos, until she got a handle on it.
Here’s what a typical day looks like, in Kruszewski’s own words:
“[Y]ou’re managing multiple priorities often without clear ownership, very likely with little notice or turnaround time. Everything’s urgent. Everyone feels like their content is the highest-level priority. You might be running half a dozen platforms responding to messages, monitoring, analytics, and trying to squeeze in creative campaigns, all while staying on top of ever-changing algorithms.”
On top of that crazy-busy schedule, other departments, including the senior leadership team, often consult with Kruszewski to galvanize a comprehensive across-campus messaging strategy. As she characterizes her job, “[I]t’s not just the workload. It’s the mental load.”
Here’s a rundown of how she organized her tasks into a plan that turned this chaotic workload into an effective strategy that made a significant impact on the Saint Mary’s campus.
Triage and Track
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Social media professionals need to triage (evaluate and categorize) all incoming requests from most critical to least. Kruszewski categorizes every request into one of the three following categories:
- The must-do tasks: Those tasks that make a high impact on the overall social media strategy, plus any requests from university leadership
- The should-do tasks: Requests that address relevant but not mission-critical issues
- The nice-to-do tasks: Optional or repetitive post requests that could be helpful but not necessary to achieve institutional goals
All other requests, then, could take the university’s communications strategy off track. Either they do not align with the platform the requesting person wants the team to post on, the institution’s brand voice, or its messaging strategy. If completed, these tasks could sabotage the overall brand strategy.
To make the triage process easier, Kruszewski uses a tracker to log and evaluate requests. Using columns for the person or unit requesting each post, the request type, priority goals, and the measurable impact the post could have, she could see request patterns at a glance.
Some areas requested a boatload of to-do posts, while other requests produced posts with high impact. Other units, Kruszewski noticed, didn’t have the capacity to request content. Those units, therefore, failed to get the visibility they needed to produce measurable results.
Using that data, Kruszewski was able to better set both boundaries and expectations. It also helped her determine areas to focus on, such as those units whose requests produced measurable results and those that didn’t have the bandwidth to initiate requests but needed the exposure social media posts would give them.
The Cooked Noodle Strategy
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Taking her inspiration from the old saying, “Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks,” Kruszewski wanted to measure which posts were really “sticking” — i.e., producing results.
For example, she gathered data showing that the university’s students engaged with their posts more on Instagram than on any other channel. Students’ parents and international students primarily used Facebook to engage with the university’s content.
That’s where the “noodles” stuck the hardest, and that’s where she focused her efforts.
It wasn’t just the number of followers on each platform, though. The types of followers engaging with the university on each platform were also relevant to see where her posts might be most effective.
For instance, although the university had a sizeable following on X, Kruszewski noticed that most of the X accounts following and engaging with Saint Mary’s were those of fellow institutions of higher education. They were competitors, not current or potential students.
So, she chose to focus her efforts only on those platforms that generated “real engagement and conversion” among the university’s target market segments. She streamlined her content, optimizing posts to gain maximum traction.
Kruszewski cautioned the attendees to focus on engagement metrics when presenting results to their institution’s leadership teams. These people might have academic and management expertise, but they have little experience in social media and communications. They need to know that it’s not the “vanity metrics,” such as follows and likes, but rather engagement and conversions that drive enrollment and attendance at campus events.
The key takeaways for you? Emphasize the results that significant metrics bring. These numbers include engagement rate, link clicks, shares, saves, and comments. More new students, more participation in college life from current students. And, even more importantly, more attention from the people who pay the bills — usually parents and guardians.
The Funnel Communications Strategy
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Kruszewski advised the attendees to align content to their audience’s journey toward conversion. Instead of siloing content by department, group content by purpose.
After all, the goal is to drive students, prospective students, and parents to take action, whether it be filling out an application, scheduling a campus visit, or signing up to attend an event. They’re not usually thinking about which department is sponsoring an event or service. Rather, they think that the institution itself is providing the information.
To put this strategy to work, think of your prospects’ customer journey as a funnel with three stages, Kruszewski suggested. Those three stages are:
- Awareness: Build awareness in your target audience by making your brand visible to those students and parents most likely to engage with your institution. Secondly, spark their curiosity about what you’re offering them.
- Engagement: Deepen their connection with your university by providing an understanding, empathetic viewpoint. When you engage with them on their wavelength, they’ll be more likely to engage with you.
- Action: Build a desire in your target audience to take whatever action you’re steering them toward. Whether it’s signing up for a campus event, applying for admission, buying a ticket for the big football game, or completing a survey about one of your university’s services, encourage them to take the next step.
Not every post needs to address all three stages. In fact, as a recent Unbounce post points out, it’s more effective when you only direct them to the next stage.
Simply moving them onto the next stage in the funnel is a more effective way to steer them down the right path. Coordinate your messaging across teams (or departments) so, as Kruszewski says, “messages reinforce rather than compete.”
Incorporate Campus-Wide Observances and Institutional Priorities
Whether it’s an upcoming holiday or specific observances, such as Mental Health Week or Black History Month, work those happenings into the conversation. People are already talking about those things, so build engagement organically by incorporating them into your posts.
The same tactic can work for institutional priorities. Let’s say your campus leadership wants to promote a healthier lifestyle among its students. Bring in your nursing, psychology, nutritional science, and medical school faculty and students into the conversation to spark interest in campus-wide wellness and exercise programs that will help them accomplish that goal.
Work your institutional priorities into posts about holidays and other observances. For example, before and during Mental Health Week, create posts that encourage students to incorporate mental health protocols into their daily routines so they can lead healthier lifestyles both in body and mind.
Focus on Student-Centric Storytelling Within Campus-Wide Initiatives
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Connect with various campus groups, departments, and service units. Encourage them to share upcoming events and developments well in advance so you’ll have time to work them into content that helps you achieve your goals. Share those goals with them so they can align their own group messaging with campus-wide themes to grow engagement.
Kruszewski characterizes her role in these meetings as follows: “Let me extract from you all the cool things so that you don’t need to add [them] to your list. Remember to tell me, and then I can start coming up in advance with ways we can talk about it, rather than relying on you to seek that out.”
With this strategy, departments and other groups weren’t simply sending her promotion requests. They began to contribute ideas and student experiences that aligned with the university’s goals, making Kruszewski’s life easier.
But more importantly, it helped the students, faculty, and staff know they have a voice — that they were “reflected in this community that they have chosen to join.” Student storytelling doesn’t just build community among current students. It also engenders a sense of camaraderie even among prospective students, who can see themselves enjoying similar success.
Finally, Use Data to Check Your Progress and Report to Leadership
After you’ve streamlined your social strategy to include only those posts that meet your goals, it might look like you’re running on cruise control to outsiders. Take, for example, your institution’s leadership team. They don’t know how much you put into strategizing and creating effective content, let alone compiling the data that helps you map out future posts.
Kruszewski suggested that you provide them with monthly “quick snapshot reports.” That way, both you and they can see how well your content is performing and identify trends that could lead to breakthroughs in your future strategy. You can also learn how to adjust some of the variables in content that doesn’t resonate with your audience to tweak its performance.
As Kruszewski puts it, it’s “posting less, but posting with more intention.” Using this strategy, you, too, can take yourself and your team out of overwhelm to make a massive impact on your institution of higher learning.
Want to discover even more about how to turn a small or solo social media team into a powerhouse voice on campus? Join North America’s best social media professionals in informative sessions at one of our upcoming social media conferences. Register for your place at the table today!
