What to Ponder Before You Pin

By Tim Cigelske

iStockphoto/thinkstock

It wasn't long ago that an institution's primary social media options were Facebook and Twitter. Then, colleges and universities began diving into social media even if they didn't quite yet know what they should be trying to accomplish with these new channels. Now, as new platforms continually emerge, knowing when it's time to invest institutional resources in a new social channel is not a clear-cut decision. When do you dive in? Where do you draw the line?

At Marquette University in Wisconsin, we've developed criteria that a social network must meet before we decide to devote time and resources to it:

• Is it innovative, unique, or a leader in format?

• Does it have critical mass or growth potential?

• Does it or could it attract one of our audiences?

• Can it provide a reasonable return on investment in advancing our goals and messages?

Marquette assesses a new site, channel, or technology's viability through quantifiable measurements, including:

• Benchmarking web traffic against marquette.edu. Sites with more traffic than our website represent a potential source for new traffic.

• Benchmarking traffic growth. Sites with rapidly increasing traffic represent a possible place where one of our audiences may gather in the future.

• Benchmarking web traffic against similar web properties in the same category. Sites that have the most traffic in their categories are gathering places for audiences.

• Verifying an audience profile. We use polls and informal data collection to determine if an audience segment is familiar or engaged with a given site. Audience profile tools such as Compete and Quantcast or media planning tools such as Google Ad Planner can help determine if a site matches the demographic profile of one of our audiences.

We've seen some early success so far. As of early November 2012, we had more than 2,000 followers on Instagram, more than 1,300 followers on Pinterest, and more than 550 followers on Tumblr. Our number of Pinterest followers places Marquette among that site's five most popular higher education pages. But numbers tell only part of the story. The draw of a new social network is about growth potential, telling your institution's story in a different way, and being able to engage your institutional community where they are. Ultimately, adding anything new to your repertoire of social media channels should enhance what you're trying to achieve on the other platforms in which you've already invested.

What's different?

Following the phenomenal early growth of Facebook and Twitter, a wave of new social networks popped up claiming to be the next Facebook or Twitter—and then just as quickly disappeared.

The reason? There already is a Facebook and a Twitter. Being a knockoff isn't enough to attract users. To have staying power, a new social network has to do something truly innovative. One example is Tumblr, a customizable microblogging platform where users can easily post text, photos, music, and videos from anywhere. Tumblr combines the accessible, attractive characteristics of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs into an elegant yet easy-to-consume hybrid package that has become its own distinctively creative community. It's a natural fit for a content-rich university setting.

We set up the Marquette Digest Tumblr blog to aggregate our best social media and website content in one place. Since no other free tool offers the same mix of features and flexibility in one package, it was worth creating and maintaining a showcase for our online creativity. The site is updated throughout the week with our most popular YouTube videos, Twitter comments, Facebook posts, and more. Because of its success, we created additional Tumblr blogs such as Thank You, @MarquetteU, which features alumni answers to the question "What are you most thankful for during your time at Marquette?" on a postcard-like backdrop of campus photographs.

Mindful of mobile

Mobile integration is another consideration. More people are spending more time on their mobile devices and flocking to the channels that work best on them. The drive toward mobile is viewed as a major factor behind Facebook's 2012 acquisition of the photo-sharing platform Instagram. Its mobile app, which makes it easy to post photos across social networks, has more than 30 million users.

"Students today are mobile first and everything else second," says Nick Alexopulos, media relations manager at Loyola University Maryland. "That's increasingly true for students, prospective students, and our young alumni. Instagram fills that niche."

I noticed a shift to Instagram among prospective Marquette students when I sent a tweet congratulating a high school senior on being accepted. I soon saw my tweet show up as a screenshot on Instagram when I searched for the tag "Marquette." To date, Marquette's photos have received more than 3,600 likes on Instagram, and there have been more than 6,200 uses of the tag "Marquette." (Instagram's recent launch of web profiles, such as instagram.com/marquetteu, will make it even easier to find, follow, and browse an institution's photos.)

Alexopulos, who posts campus photos for LUM's more than 1,000 followers via Instagram's mobile app, has had a similar experience. He finds that the photos get more "likes" on Instagram than on Facebook, even though Facebook has many more users.

"There's a chance that they may pay a lot more attention to my photo on Instagram than the email I'm sending them," he says. "They're more engaged. They're going to feel much more connected, and then they're more likely to open that email that says ‘come to this alumni event' or ‘donate to this campaign.' "

Growing community

In January 2012, the social bookmarking site Pinterest, which enables users to collect and share online photos of things they like or find interesting by posting them to their own virtual pin boards, became the fastest-growing website in history when it gained more than 10 million unique visitors in less than two years. By then, it became impossible for us to ignore.

Those who view Pinterest as just another place to store photos online underestimate the characteristics that helped it grow so quickly—the community-based nature of being able to easily share and organize visuals. Content spreads rapidly as members pin and re-pin—Pinterest's version of a tweet—inspirational and aspirational high-quality images with a few clicks.

Long before Marquette established its Pinterest presence, members of our audience were there sharing their own images, some of which included our campus and other things related to Marquette. Using Facebook and Twitter, we asked our audience if they were interested in seeing Marquette start a Pinterest page. The answer was a resounding yes. As Pinterest's growth began to explode, it made sense for us to join and sate our biggest fans by offering our own images for them to share.

When we consider using another social channel, we look at whom we will interact with and how we want to reach them. Creating content that's fit for each platform and its users is essential. A social network can have all the buzz in the world, but that won't get you very far if you're not engaging with your audience in the right way.

We learned this lesson in 2008 when we set up a Facebook group for the incoming freshman class. A majority of the class—about 1,500 people—joined to interact with peers and admissions counselors. When we asked for feedback about their journey to campus, many said that the Facebook group was the most helpful part of the process because it gave them a place to connect with their peers. Facebook groups reached the right community with the right content, so we've continued to set up a dedicated group for each new freshman class.

On Pinterest, whose users are predominantly women, it's important to avoid overt self-promotion. To work within the community ethos, I post visuals to our board that have appeal beyond Marquette. While posting a photo album of campus events may work on Facebook or Flickr, it won't fly on Pinterest. I organize Pinterest photos to showcase alumni traveling to exotic places, wedding photos on campus, even cookies decorated in Marquette's blue and gold colors.

Pinterest also provides a new way to repackage and repurpose our content. For example, we took a 2010 Marquette Magazine cover story on 100 things students should do before they graduate and created a "graduation bucket list" board with 100 different photos that each link back to the original article. It's now standard practice for us to pin new visuals that relate back to alumni magazine stories. We then share the link through our other social media channels.

Kia Smith, social media coordinator at Spelman College in Georgia, takes a similar approach to her college's Pinterest boards. "Our network can flip through our boards and see the Spelman story told through images," she says. "When they find something that really grabs their attention, they can click through to read the entire story."

Telling stories in a fresh way can energize and help grow the community along with the platform. Smith, who has seen engagement with Spelman's Pinterest page increase daily, is working to include more infographs, more pins from students and alumnae, and pins that provide students and alumnae with career planning and wellness information.

Take the long view

There's a good reason the phrase shiny object syndrome is mentioned every time another social tool appears: It's a real problem. The gleam of something new can distract your attention from the places you've already made investments. The danger with any innovation is that it caters only to early adopters at the expense of ignoring the majority of your audience.

Creating and launching something is easy; maintaining it isn't. The untold blogs littering the Internet should be proof enough of that. Planning and maintenance are vital to any discussion about adopting a new channel. Who will monitor and maintain it? How will content be developed?

While these are not new problems, they do multiply with each channel you add. Success comes when you can launch and maintain your networks in a way that encourages innovation and community without detracting from or interfering with your other goals.

But it's not a zero-sum game. Repurposing content is key to social media success at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to John Lucas, social media coordinator. For example, UW-Madison students were encouraged to email or tweet their 2012 graduation day photos, which the university then posted to the "Share the Moment" page of its website.

"That was really low risk and zero cost," Lucas says. "Our decision is often more about how easily can we operate this platform and get some return back without [it] being overly time-consuming."

Lucas also cross-pollinates the campus's Pinterest account by creating a board dedicated to Instagram photos that members of its audience have posted. (We do this at Marquette also; however, we post audience members' photos across different boards according to categories, such as "Marquette Weddings" and "Marquette Style.")

The content on your institution's social media presences can go to work for you. At Marquette, we pull the feeds from our Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare accounts so that they automatically post to www.marquette.edu/social. Repurposing our content in this way allows us to harness innovative social media tools to build our community while also maximizing our reach by placing Marquette content in front of a much larger audience—our website's more than 100,000 monthly visitors. The more integrated our platforms are the better.

In deciding whether to take on another social media channel, try looking at the issue another way. Rather than wondering how it may distract from your other efforts, ask how it can add to them. It can feel risky to bet your time and resources on something that didn't exist yesterday. However, not investing in social media today can make your institution less relevant tomorrow.