Permanent link for A guide to determining your social media audience on February 14, 2022

Knowing your audience is key to crafting successful social media. If you know who is following you and is interested in seeing what you’re sharing, you can tailor your posts platform-by-platform to reach the right people at the right time. 

Here’s a few tips for how to identify your social media audience.

Analyze Your Analytics

You don’t need a fancy analytics platform, such as Sprout, in order to get a decent idea of your audience. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have decent internal analytics trackers that will give you an idea of which posts are most successful for you month-to-month. 

Take a look at your most successful and most unsuccessful posts you’ve made recently. What types of people engaged with it most? Was it current GVSU students? Possibly alumni? Or was it a broader audience of parents and community members?

Make note of what groups engage most with your posts platform by platform, then you can move on to the next step in understanding your audience.

We also recommend checking out this guide to identifying the best times of day to post, as this can better help you connect with your audience. 

Create Buyer Personas

Now it’s time to think deeper about the groups you just identified. Create a document outlining fictional versions of the people most likely to engage with you. This page provides a very helpful guide to creating buyer personas. 

The purpose of creating buyer personas is to have a more detailed picture of not only who is currently engaged with your social media, but also which less engaged groups you want to increase engagement with.

The process of creating a buyer persona document isn’t as tedious as it may sound, and it can be an eye-opening exercise! We recommend giving it a shot. 

Make a Plan

There are a variety of ways you can go about creating a plan to best engage all the different sections of your audience. 

You could consider color coding your content plan based on which buyer persona each post appeals to. Another option would be to center your content around a certain audience for each week or month, creating a theme to drive your content. 

All of this can seem like some unnecessary work, it’s just social media, right? Wrong! Doing this work can help you work smarter, not harder. Increasing engagement on your social media posts and fitting your content to your audience will translate to more successful social media overall. It always pays to have a plan.

As always, please contact us at [email protected] if you need any assistance. 

Categories: engagement strategy
Posted by Anna Young on Permanent link for A guide to determining your social media audience on February 14, 2022.

Permanent link for Creating excitement through social media on August 24, 2021

Fall semester is upon us, and it’s an exciting time on campus. Students, faculty and staff are looking forward to kicking off the new academic year, but how do you translate that enthusiasm to your department’s social media? We’ve outlined a few ideas to get you started. 

Run a giveaway

Everyone loves a chance to win something for free! Consider developing a giveaway that revolves around a current campaign of yours, or ties into welcoming students back to campus. 

GVSU’s social media has a tradition of a Fall Photo Contest, where students are able to submit photos of campus in hopes of winning a prize. We ask our followers to vote on their favorite photos in order to determine the winner, so it’s a great engagement generator for us as well. 

You don’t even need a big, flashy prize to attract engagement, something as simple as a dining gift card or a free sweatshirt is enough to get users excited. Just remember not to make your giveaway too complicated. 

We provide more details on how to run a giveaway in another recent blog, which you can read here. 

Get out and about

Think of ways to tie your current social media priorities into what is happening on campus. Is there an event coming up that might align with the work of individuals in your department? Can you show a professor teaching an engaging class? What about a rockstar staff member sharing a photo of their favorite spot on campus?

Showing the hustle and bustle of GVSU is exciting to everyone in the campus community, and as social media managers we play a key role in showing all of the amazing things happening on campus each day. Keep that in mind when planning your social media content for the semester. 

Ask the audience

Remember that your followers are excited about the fall semester too! Utilize poll, quiz and rating options on different social media platforms to draw engagement and generate information from your followers. 

For example, on GVSU’s Instagram, we asked our followers to submit some of their favorite places in the area to spend time. With the hundreds of responses we received, we were able to turn that into a TikTok, plus an Instagram Highlight! Our followers can use that for inspiration as to what they should do for fun after returning to GVSU.

Categories: engagement
Posted by Anna Young on Permanent link for Creating excitement through social media on August 24, 2021.

Permanent link for How we hosted a virtual graduate celebration for the GVSU Class of 2020 on May 7, 2020

Written By Meagan Saxton

When GVSU President Philomena V. Mantella announced remote learning would continue through the Winter 2020 semester in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most popular questions was: what about commencement?

Celebrating our class of 2020 and their achievements was, and still is, important to us. We knew that whatever was planned – it wouldn’t be the same as an April ceremony at Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids.

The decision made was to postpone the in-person ceremony to October and host a virtual graduate celebration on the GVSU Facebook and YouTube pages. While we have broadcasted events on YouTube, a virtual commencement was a new concept for all of us. Here is a breakdown of what we did and how we did it.

Film and edit the virtual celebration video.

We give major kudos to the GVSU video team for filming and editing the full celebration. It included a message from President Mantella, Provost Maria Cimitile, clips submitted by each of the deans of GVSU’s eight colleges, names of all the graduates (3,000+) and it closed with a musical performance from a graduating senior. The virtual celebration’s length came in just under 40 minutes.

Promote the celebration ahead of time.

Of course, we had to get the word out. President Mantella announced in a Zoom town hall with current students and on her Twitter that there would be a virtual celebration. We also posted about the celebration on all GVSU social platforms a week in advance and the day before.

Choosing the best platform for a virtual celebration: Facebook and YouTube Premiere.

We chose to host the video on our Facebook and YouTube channels because we knew a majority of our audience would be able to find the celebration on one of those pages. We also chose those two platforms for the live comment functionality. By utilizing the premiere setting on Facebook, we were able to upload the video ahead of time. Doing so created an event on the GVSU page and alerted people following the page when the video went live. The premiere setting on YouTube also allowed us to upload the video ahead of time and created a countdown screen.

Once it was time for the video to go live, the GVSU Social team watched on both platforms to make sure it went off without any issues and to monitor comments. 

Additional commencement content.

We knew this was not the usual ending for graduating students, but we wanted to still celebrate our class of 2020 with commencement-specific content.

This included: an Instagram AR filter with a graduation cap; class of 2020 graphics for Facebook and Twitter headers and Instagram Stories; an infographic with the number of graduates, dean’s list students, top undergrad and graduate degrees and more. Other GVSU social accounts created content, such as congratulatory messages from GVSU alumni.

How it went.

This was a successful and unique way to celebrate the class of 2020 without hosting an in-person ceremony. Peak viewership on YouTube reached 1,284 and on Facebook it reached 958. During the time of the celebration, some of our followers posted photos of them watching while wearing their cap and gown. We retweeted and reshared some of these photos on our Instagram story. To date, the video has received more than 47,789 views of at least 3 seconds on Facebook and 8,993 views on YouTube. We’re looking forward to the day we can celebrate the class of 2020 in-person!

Watch the video on YouTube here.

Categories: engagement
Posted on Permanent link for How we hosted a virtual graduate celebration for the GVSU Class of 2020 on May 7, 2020.

Permanent link for Tips for holding a contest on social media on November 11, 2019

Written By Meagan Saxton

Who doesn’t love to win — especially when a prize is involved?

Hosting a contest on social media is a great way to engage with followers and give back to them for supporting your brand/page. The GVSU Social team holds an annual #GVFall photo contest to do just that. To participate, we asked followers to include #GVFall with their fall photos of Grand Valley on Instagram or Twitter.

This year, there were more than 130 submissions for the contest, which began October 15 and submissions ended October 31. Our team selected the top six photos and posted them early November on Twitter and Instagram for GVSU followers to vote and pick the top three. The top three winners were announced two days later and the first place photo was posted on all GVSU social platforms.

Coordinating a social media contest takes just as much, if not more, planning than day-to-day posts. Here are the top three things we learned, and what we want to change for next year’s contest.

Find the time-frame sweet spot.

We accepted photos for a little more than two weeks. At first, our team thought this might be too long. Looking at how many submissions we received, we could have ended the contest a few days earlier. However, we were waiting on unpredictable Michigan weather and for the leaves to change before we started. Every contest is different, so our tip is to know what you are asking of people and give them enough time to participate.

Set an entry cap.

We loved seeing all the great campus beauty shots, however, some people submitted more than five photos. This made picking the top six difficult. If someone submitted more than one photo to the contest that our team liked, we picked our favorite from that one person to keep the top six fair. Next year, the #GVFall rules will be more clear on entries.

Create an efficient voting system.

The top six photos were posted on Twitter as a thread and as a gallery on Instagram. Counting votes from Twitter was simple, because people favorited the tweet that had their top pick. With the Instagram gallery, each photo had a number associated to it and followers were asked to comment the photo’s number to vote. The post garnered more than 700 comments, which lead to creating a spreadsheet and counting each vote by hand. In the future, finding one way for people to vote would save time and energy.

If something in your contest doesn’t go as planned, remember that part of hosting a social media contest is trial and error to learn what works best for your page and followers. Be clear and consistent with messaging and you’ll be on your way to having a successful contest!

Categories: best practices engagement
Posted on Permanent link for Tips for holding a contest on social media on November 11, 2019.