Social Media marketing, strategy and professional development blog for Jon-Stephen Stansel, a social media strategist living in Conway, Arkansas.
When he’s not working behind the scenes for local theatre productions, sampling craft beers, or making GIFs, Andrew Cassel is the social media content strategist behind the University of Alaska Fairbanks’s intensely engaging social media accounts. He approaches his work with an unparalleled enthusiasm that is absolutely contagious. I recently asked him about how he manages his day-to-day work in the world of higher ed social media.
Read MoreGIFs are the lingua franca of Twitter. They can express complex ideas and emotions that can’t fit into a Tweet, create humor and levity, or add a personal touch to a reply. In higher education, we use them constantly to congratulate students when they’ve just been accepted, share the excitement of the school year starting, or wish students luck on final exams.
However, GIFs are not without their problems.
Read MoreI’ve heard it said a thousand times. “It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for social.”
This is often said when reviewing sub-par content that has no other place to go. Or maybe it’s said after taking an out of focus photo on the fly at an event before Tweeting it out to thousands of uninterested followers. The sad fact is a lot of people think that there is a low bar for content posted to social media. However, this is far from the truth as social media has matured and the quality of content from brands and media outlets has increased rapidly and dramatically. Blurry cell phone photos and shaky videos no longer cut it.
Social media is the voice of your brand, so why would you settle for anything less than excellent?
Read MoreIf I told you that I had a job where I spoke to thousands of people everyday, handled crisis management, customer service, paid advertising, content strategy, and long list of other duties, you’d assume I was pretty high up in my organization, right? You’d ask my title expecting something high-level and when I said social media manager your perception would change. “Oh, I bet you have a lot of fun! Are you just starting with the company?” This is a sad fact of life for many social media managers and something the profession needs to overcome. Social media has matured and with it, so has the position of social media manager. However, it is often seen by most organizations as an entry-level position at best.
Read MoreSo, you’ve spent hours creating a Snapchat Geofilter for your school. You’ve made sure it fits all of your branding guidelines, gotten approval from your creative director, maybe even shown it to a few higher-ups at the university who’ve heard that Snapchat is the “in” thing right now. You carefully write up a description, map out your geofence, and holding your breath you submit the filter to Snapchat. A few days later, you get the dreaded rejection email. But no big deal right? Snapchat rejects filters all the time. You’ll make some changes and try again. But then you see it. There’s a new filter on your campus. You didn’t design it…you don’t know who did. The colors are off, the typeface isn’t one of those on your approved list. It’s not a bad filter, it’s just not quite right. How did Snapchat approve this filter but not yours?
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