Question

Topic: Social Media

How Do I Use Social Media With Diverse Groups?

Posted by Anonymous on 6/5/2013 at 11:03 PM ET 125 Points
I'm struggling to develop an effective Social Media strategy to reach people who enroll in 20 different training programs and the supervisors who send them to get trained.

Each different group is primarily concerned with their own respective area of expertise, so if we send out a broad selection of information, most people will only be interested in about 10% of all messaging. With that level of relevancy, a high percentage of everyone we reach is likely to opt out over time because the majority of posts won't be relevant to their area of interest.

On the other hand, setting up specialized Social Media channels for every single subject area makes the entire process of managing a Social Media effort very, very burdensome. We could easily have 20 dedicated points for each Social Media channel we use, resulting in 100+ specific communication points to manage.

How do I use existing Social Media channels (Facebook, LinkeIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Flickr, etc.) to reach a very big audience with diverse areas of interest, which don't overlap with other areas?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Moriarty on 6/6/2013 at 3:58 AM Accepted
    Never, ever let academics loose with marketing. If there's a problem you'll have three more by the end of the day.

    Another issue is what are you trying to achieve through this? Are your students going to look at your emails and think "oh. Another boring piece. I'll skim it just in case"?

    Social media is all about engagement - and from my experience that is singularly lacking in the academic world. After all, you can't be objective and engage, can you? And objectivity is the central tenet of academic thinking. I'm not going to pull rank, but I can do the academic stuff and it bored me to tears.

    What you need is client-side segmentation. I am presuming you have a mailing list. The simplest way is to let your readers decide. It'll save you a lot of hassle. It'll take a few months to get right, it will work because they're doing all the hard work. Actually it's not hard work for them, the point is that for you it would be, and would take a lot of time too.

    This means that their having opted-in, they are less likely to opt out in the future.

    So in your newsletters, just give them something to click through to that leads to a page that is specific not general. You'll have to be careful here as we're going cross-curriculum. You'll not find the neat boundaries you get when you determine these things for them. When they make the choices, you get a real mix. It is however, what speaks directly to them. It will seem a mess, it will work.

    After that, you can decide how you are to engage specific lecturers and their specific needs. It may well take another level of segmentation. You can do this across the newsletters too, because when you don't have fixed boundaries, you can start tying threads together again.

    Does this help any?


  • Posted on 6/6/2013 at 10:18 AM Author
    My personal philisophy is to make every effort to send information that specifically targets a constituency's area of interest, making the post, Tweet, link as relevant as possible to the targeted audience. If you can customize the message, all the better...but given limitations imposed on me from upper management of using specific channels (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) to cater to ALL constituencies is the real problem here.

    Don't get me wrong, I recognize that developing a campaign so that our current subscribers specify their areas of interest would be great...but upper management doesn't want that to happen. While I can make an argument for that to happen, with us eventually getting different accounts in each Social Media channel to manage specific messaging, that probably won't fly with executives.

    An offshoot of that area of interest strategy is that there may be 100 different social media accounts to manage, each targeting a different audience. While one could do that with dynamic content via websites or email, is that possible with the social media channels that exist today?

    Now - assuming that we can only use one social media account to address all of these constituencies, how do we do it and have it be effective?

    Objectives for social media would be to increase level of involvement for enrollees and decision-makers, by offering relevant content. This could range from mini-lessons from professors to updates about new course offerings to news about the school and more. By offering relevant information, we're hoping to increase subscription/follow rates as a way to steadily increase shareability and earned media. By expanding the network via earned media, I suspect that enrollment rates would be positively affected.

    Thoughts?
  • Posted by Moriarty on 6/6/2013 at 12:04 PM Member
    [RANT]

    You face the commonest problem a marketer can face - the management thinks they know best and will tell this to their customers. They have their carts hitched in front of the horses. Who's pulling? The horses or the cart?

    It's not that hard to work out.

    So put this to them: if they want more sales and sensible social media marketing, they need to listen to the people who are buying. That is, buying. Marketing isn't about selling. It's about those who are buying.

    It is that simple.

    I'm not a marketer who takes that kind of nonsense. If they want that sort of thing, hire in a suit who'll charge by the day what I charge for my monthly retainer. Those suits make their money not by giving good advice, they make their money by giving dumb managers EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. The managers are so stupid they will even think it's good advice.

    Spare me!

    As long as the management are happy to make good those shortfalls from their own pocket and so satisfy their shareholders - that's fine by me.

    Either that or they can face up to their responsibilities to those who have invested their hard-earned money in their business.

    Listen to your customers. Final.

    When you say "but given limitations imposed on me from upper management" is when I get cross. You'd noticed, right? Any business who takes this line with me is SACKED ON THE SPOT. I'll even return their money just to show them how angry I am with them. Believe me, sending money back to these kinds of people has effects that can only be described as magical.


    [/RANT]

    So what are you going to do? Invest in clever - and very expensive - software that will help you wade through this mess? Or get clever and save yourself large sums whilst seeing your customer interaction statistics take a leap in the right direction?

    It's not a hard choice to make in reality. The reality of the situation you find yourself in could be called a farce.


  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 6/6/2013 at 5:37 PM Accepted
    How do you reach a very big audience with diverse areas of interest, which don't overlap with other areas?

    You don't.

    At least, not without deeply segmented lists, a strict posting plan for each list that offers content specifically for their areas of interest and to which you adhere as if your life depended on it, and a with the help of a small, though highly focused team.

    So, segment your lists, divide the tasks, and focus your content streams to specific layers or bands of interest..

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 6/7/2013 at 12:25 AM Accepted
    Why not segment your content by area (not simply subject, but by logical group), and allow people to choose the segments they wish to subscribe to?
  • Posted on 6/7/2013 at 7:32 AM Author
    We certainly do segment our content by subject area, but I don't know how one can enable people to receive subject specific content via social media without creating dozens and dozens of different accounts (10 in Facebook, 10 in Twitter, 10 in LinkedIn, 10 in Google+).

    That is the crux of my problem. Social Media today doesn't offer dynamic content. Does it?
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