Taking care of my school's social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) does take time out of my day but it is time that I feel is well worth it. In an effort to be as efficient as possible with your time, and in order to get as much bang for your buck, I want to share with you my social media secret weapon. Before I do that though I would like to point you to my last post, “Here a Dollar, There a Dollar…But My Social Media Budget Is Not That Big“, which details some of my other time saving secrets.
Social Media Goals
When launching a social media campaign I think there are a number of questions that must be answered prior to the launch in order for you to be successful. They are:
- Who is going to post the content?
- How much original versus repurposed content will you use? (Repurposed content would be content originally posted someplace else and then posted to your social media site, e.g. A news article that is posted on your school website first and then posted on your Facebook Fan Page.)
- When are you going to post the content?
- How often do you want to post new content?
- What is the make-up of your content?
I'll answer those question for you with regard to our two main social media channels: Facebook and Twitter.
- I would post the content.
- We would use a mix of original and repurposed content and the percentages would slide but ultimately hover around 50%/50%.
- We would post content during the day and in the evening when the majority of our students would be on Facebook.
- We would like to have 2 posts a day.
- The content can be links to webpages, photos from campus, or news articles.
- I would post the content
- We would post links to other content. The other content would be a mix of driving traffic back to our official school website, Facebook Fan Page, or YouTube Channel as well as links to articles talking about our school, teachers, or students.
- We would post the content at all different times of day.
- We would like to have at least 3 posts a day.
- The content would mainly be links to content outlined in Question #2
Without Further Audieu
Please notice that the answer to Question #1 for Facebook and Twitter is “I would post the content.” Because of this fact coupled with my goal to post to Facebook twice a day and to Twitter three times a day, I found a secret weapon in the management of our social media channels. That secret weapon is Tumblr. My guess is that you have probably never heard of Tumblr and if you have you probably have no idea what it is. Well quite simply, Tumblr is a free micro-blog which differs from traditionally blogging in that the posts typically are much shorter and are more multimedia-based, e.g. photos and videos, as opposed to text-based. Microblogging is not my secret weapon but the fact, listen carefully now, that I have configured Tumblr to automatically post any content I send to Tumblr to our school's Facebook and Twitter account is my secret weapon. Couple this with the fact that Tumblr has created a brilliantly simple FREE iPhone App that allows me to post to our Tumblr account from my iPhone means that I can walk around campus and take photos and short videos, send them to Tumblr, which will in turn post to our school's Facebook and Twitter accounts has me feeling like a superhero. I can literally reach my goals within 5 minutes. 5 mintues a day seems like a manageable amount of time to spend maintaining our social media channels and let me tell you it is well worth it.
I would love to hear your experiences with Tumblr or any other “secret weapons” you might have in your arsenal fighting social media management.
Additional Note: Another free micro-blogging platform that I have evaluated is called Posterous. I can also recommend Posterous and it has the distinct advantage of being able to automatically post to more services than Tumblr. Where I felt that Tumblr really shined was with their much more robust iPhone App.
