Digital Content Curation as a Social Media Strategy

How to Make the University Community Tell Your Story through a Hashtag Thomas Listerman Senior Director of E-Communications Office of Communications and Marketing University of San Francisco

Does This Sound Familiar?

53% agree that shortage of staffing for day-to-day content management is a barrier to successful use of social media. Source: 2014 CASE Social Media Survey

•  “We need a photo for Instagram, and something for Snapchat too! Did anyone post to LinkedIn today?”

•  “We need to go viral! Why don’t we go viral?”

•  “Let’s post another furry dog. Everybody loves furry dogs.”

•  “Does this engagement really have any value?”

Behold: The Bigger Picture

What do university constituents want?

•  Prospective students: find out if the university is the best fit

•  Students: learn, find friends, have fun, prepare for a career

•  Faculty: build/show their expertise in favorite subjects, engage with peers, promote books, courses, and events

•  Staff: drive recruitment, retention and engagement

•  Alumni: network with other alumni, feel proud of their alma mater, and (hopefully) find reasons to support their university

Behold: The Bigger Picture

What role could social media play in helping university constituents reach their goals?

•  Prospective students use social media to research their options

•  Students use social media to share their learning experience, have fun with friends, and create a profile to build a career

•  Faculty use social media to build their expert profile in their favorite subjects, engage with peers, promote books, courses, and events

•  Staff use social media to drive recruitment, retention and engagement

•  Alumni use social media to network and express pride in their alma mater

Take-Away #1

Thousands of students, hundreds of faculty and staff, and lots of alumni do great things on and off your campus every day.

They use social media to share their experiences.

We should do something with that.

Change Your Social Media From Here

What are the strategic reasons for a university to spend resources on social media?

•  Recruitment: Show prospective students what it’s like to be a student at your university, using content provided by your students

•  Retention: Show students the diversity of campus life so that every individual can find interesting people and activities to connect with

•  Engagement: Show the value of education after graduation by sharing authentic alumni “class notes” with the community

Change Your Social Media From Here

What is the purpose of the #?

•  Categorize content

•  Provide context

•  Provide emotion

•  Cross platforms

•  Enable people to share

Take-Away #2

Promote one hashtag to make the university community focus their conversation in one “place” and share across platforms.

Be Smart About Resources

How can the university benefit most from the constant stream of interesting content that your community provides?

Less control More control

More work

Aggregate “trusted” social media accounts in one feed

Go through the content stream to select ideas for news stories

Less work

Feature the full content stream

Curate the content stream to select and feature content that illustrates your story

What is Curation?

“To take charge of (a museum) or organize (an art exhibit)”

“To pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or website content” Dictionary.com

“A curator is a Web Super Hero” Steve Rosenbaum, Waywire.com

Be Smart About Resources

What are your priorities? Here’s a suggestion:

1.  50% Monitoring and Response: Keep track of all mentions of the university, respond where needed, and identify good content

2.  >25% Curation: Select the best content out of the stream that helps you tell your brand story, edit and feature that content

3.  <25% Create: Only when you need to add to the conversation

Take-Away #3

1. Listening & Response 2. Curation

3. Creation

Take-Away #4

It’s probably 20% more engaging to shut up and share the word.

hashtag.usfca.edu

How does #USFCA work?

Tag – you’re it!

1.  Tag your post “#USFCA” on any social media platform

Then, we:

2.  Monitor all social media mentions, including the #USFCA tag

3.  Curate posts that support the USF brand story

4.  Feature the selected posts on hashtag.usfca.edu

5.  Let the sources know we featured their post

6.  Share the post across our social media platforms

What do we hang on our wall?

The content tells the diverse story about how we are changing the world from here.

#USFCA features a mix of content from students, alumni, employees,

departments, schools, and organizations – reflecting the experience

students have when coming to the university of the best city ever. In

the daily monitoring, we specifically look for posts that illustrate what the USF brand is about:

•  San Francisco Advantage »

•  Engaged Learning »

•  Leading and Succeeding »

•  Passion for Justice »

What about guidelines for users?

Curation enables us to keep it simple. We only ask users to:

•  Keep it relevant. What are people talking about? What should they be talking about?

•  Keep it non-commercial. Avoid commercial content, because we do.

•  Keep it civilized. Constructive critique is fine, but don’t be mean.

Is #USFCA engaging?

It’s 20% more engaging to shut up and curate.

The curated posts proved to be 20% more engaging on average,

compared to the “official” posts that we created in-house.

•  Out of 10,000 students, 1,384 were selected and featured (so far)

•  #USFCA grew the social conversation about USF by 60%

•  Use of the hashtag #USFCA increased by 325%

•  260,000 views to hashtag.usfca.edu (and counting)

•  Sharing the curated content across our social media sites helped

the university achieve one of its best social media years in 2013/14,

with an overall 38% community growth

Take-Away #4

Cumulative views to hashtag.usfca.edu Oct 2013 – Oct 2014

Is #USFCA sticky?

5,000 content items from 1,384 unique sources = contributors keep on tagging

The 260,000 views and high engagement rates, especially among

prospective and current students, have led us to use the stories

beyond the social space (with permission granted):

•  In printed recruiting materials, such as the USF viewbook

•  On digital signage around campus

•  For email marketing campaigns to prospects, students and alumni

•  As the lead for a “good old” USF news/magazine story

Did #USFCA make a difference?

#USFCA changed three types of behavior:

1.  We added content curation to our monitoring and content creation routines and never looked back.

2.  The USF community addresses the university through one common tag instead of using USF (University of South Florida mix-up risk) or the full university name (too long to tweet).

3.  The positive reinforcement through #USFCA has led to more mentions that are positive and illustrate USF’s brand messages.

What worked at USF might change the world for other higher education institutions and brands out there looking for a content marketing strategy that is fast and cheap to implement, feasible to manage with a small team, and could yield great results for any campaign (hint, hint).

Ready to start curating? Consider this

•  Start with monitoring and response

•  Give the community one common hashtag

•  Always link back to the source

•  Always reach out to the source

•  Keep it simple

•  Edit headline, content, image to tell your story

•  Stay visual

•  Base your curation on brand messages

•  Experiment to find balance between curated and created content

•  Involve students as interns and focus groups

•  Re-launch (before) every semester

•  Enjoy being a Web Super Hero!