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This week’s blog comes from the lovely and intelligent, Taylor Plourde. Taylor is a Junior at Roberts Weslayan College and loves writing and all things social media and marketing. She is currently working as BASIC’s intern and has awesome insight into helping your group utilize social media for maximum exposure on campus! Check it out.
Getting the word out about your BASIC group can be a bit challenging. People are poster blind, that’s just a fact, so social media is the way to go. But social media can be a bit intimidating if you don’t know where to start. Here are four tips on how to set your group’s social media pages up for success.
Go Where Students Are
As with any form of marketing, you have to go where your audience is. On social media that means you have to figure out the platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) where students at your school spend most of their time.
It will probably take a few different tries before you find the best platform, but it will all be worth it once you find your sweet spot! If you want to get real fancy then you can even look at all the different analytics out there about who sees what when. If you’re just starting off then the basics will work, no need to dive in too deep (yet). A good starting place are mage based platforms like snapchat and Instagram (they’re very popular right now).
Use Visuals
Pictures and videos are how you will grab people’s attentions. Good videos and pictures will work even better! If you don’t have a knack for photography, no worries, there are plenty of copyright free images out there for you to snag. One great resource that’s full of amazing photos and is free (yes 100% free) is unsplash.com.
Sometimes just a picture isn’t enough. Sometimes you will want to edit it with a text box (be careful not to put too much text on the picture), or incorporate some shapes, lines, frames, etc. Photoshop works great if you have some design training and access to the program, but if you don’t then a great place (which is also free) to tweak your pictures is canva.com.
Sometimes you might need a little inspiration, I recommend checking out accounts that you love and trying to imitate what they do. When all else fails, you can always find something on Pinterest that fits the theme/ tone/ mood that you’re going for.
Be Consistent
Visuals are very important, but consistency in those visuals is even more important. When putting together photos and videos you have to keep in mind the goal of the pictures and content. Every image should be pushing for the same goal, such as encouraging people to attend your BASIC group’s events/ meetings.
If all the ideas and goals for the posts are the same then you ought to make them all look the same because on social media first impressions are everything! The best way to keep a feed consistent is to have one person (two tops) working on the social media. Another way to keep everything looking the same is to use the same/ similar filters, dimensions, layout, and graphics on all of the photos and videos you post on your feed (Stories are a whole different beast).
A few Instagram accounts that do this really well are @SheTheRoar, @mvmntbk, and @MoralRevolution. So hook ‘em in with an interesting image that fits your theme (basically your brand) and inform, invite, or inspire with the content.
engage, Engage, ENGAGE!
Having good content is obviously important, but the most important thing you can do on social media is engage with the students you’re trying to reach. That means you have to do something to get them to get them to do more than just like your post.
Engagement can be tricky, but a few of the best ways to engage with the students is through direct messaging, liking/ commenting on their posts, posting polls, using hashtags, and live video to name just a few.
Whichever approach to engagement you chose, make sure it’s timely. That means replying to messages within the hour it was sent (max), commenting on posts the day of, using polls at a time when most students will be online, etc. You don’t need perfect timing, but try to be quick to connect.
With these basics under your belt, go out and make a killer social media page, but keep in mind that this is just scratching the surface. Social media is a powerful tool, use it well friends.
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