Institutional Social Media Goals – New Year Perspectives from Duke University and Indiana University

SM Goals 2016The beginning of the year is a time to re-evaluate our goals. On that note, we asked two different directors of social media strategy at two institutions the following question:

In what ways are looking to experiment and innovate in 2016 to advance your institution’s social media goals?

Here are responses to this question from Cara Rousseau, Manager of Social and Digital Media Strategy at Duke University, and Kristofer Karol, Director of Social Media Strategy at Indiana University.

CaraCara Rousseau: Duke’s digital media team is thinking about three key themes for the upcoming year:

1) Making sure we are digital-first in all of our storytelling. Our digital and social media team thinks this way, but we’re hoping to increase outreach and education about thinking through online channel distribution before stories, videos and campaigns are created, across the university.

2) Right-sizing video and visuals. We are looking hard at how content is best delivered on individual channels: 15-second clips on Instagram, “silent films” with captions on Facebook, snappy and magical Vines, Periscope video streams of live events on campus, etc. We expect 2016 to be the year when we think even more strategically about every element we produce and how it is served up to our audiences.

3) Global targeting. Duke has had a successful suite of Chinese social media accounts for a number of years now, and we plan to expand our global targeting to other key demographics like Brazil and India in our social media promotion and outreach.

kris karolKristofer Karol: Indiana University is constantly looking to see how social media can best be used to “move the needle.” Currently, IU, especially at its IUPUI campus in Indianapolis, focuses on response rate, followers, click-throughs and, most importantly, engagements (RTs, likes, shares, comments, etc) to track social media success. That said, we’re trying to do a better job across all our campuses of directing followers to a specific website or calls-to-action by working on more integrated marketing and communications plans.

Furthermore, we’ve established a university-wide advisory committee to create a strategic plan for social media that will help with consistency in the look, institutional messages and personality of all our official channels. It’s important in this day and age to have a consistent look or style among a university’s larger social media channels, but the challenge is how to walk that fine line between sharing those bigger messages while still maintaining one’s own unique personality or online identity. We don’t want every social media account across our campuses to sound exactly the same, but we do all need to be laddering up to a broader plan.

What are some of your institutional social media goals this year? Feel free to share in the comments.