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Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College

“What’s Next?: Using Social Media to Engage with Your Alumni”

Social Media Strategies Summit-Higher Education Boston, MA, July 23, 2015

Robert Bochnak, Assistant Director, Alumni Marketing and Communications, Harvard Business

School

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A little bit about me….

-Assistant Director of Alumni Marketing and Communications at the Harvard Business School where I manage the office’s social media channels.

-Graduate of UMass-Amherst and the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

-Author, Social Media Matters blog, http://robertbochnak.wordpress.com/

-Sidekick of Aniceta and Mateo

http://robertbochnak.wordpress.com/

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My (Simple) Goal

Use social media—Twitter,

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,

etc.—to forge meaningful digital

relationships with Harvard

Business School Alumni.

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The Obstacles

“71 percent of tweets get absolutely no response from the world.”

-Wired Magazine, October 2010

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The Obstacles cont.

“The average Twitter user has 208 followers.”

-The Analytics Firm Beevolve, October 2012

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The Obstacles cont.

This guy

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The Obstacles cont.

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Overcoming these challenges has meant taking a number of different approaches….and, when it comes to Twitter, it all starts with this.

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Our Twitter Approach

Identify

EngageLeverage

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Identify

Engage

Leverage

We find alumni on Twitter and add them to the appropriate Twitter list

We connect with alumni by sharing their blog posts, career news, etc.

We involve alumni in the creation of user-generated content

Our Twitter Approach cont.

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Our Approach: Identify HBS alumni who are on Twitter and add them to the appropriate list.

We have identified and “tagged” more than 6,000 alumni on Twitter

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Our Approach: Engage alumni through retweets, original tweets promoting their work, tweets sharing events, tweets connecting alumni with each other, tweets to alumni based on their interests, etc.

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Our Approach cont.

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Our Approach cont.

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Our Approach cont.

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Our Approach: Leverage the relationships we have developed with alumni so they participate in discussions

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Our Approach cont.

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But before all this engagement could happen we needed to collect data on our alumni….

So we decided that each alumni interaction we had on Twitter would be tracked on an excel spreadsheet. This sheet would include information drawn from the Twitter profile and alumni directory file of each alumnus/a and would include information such as city and state of residence, interest, year of graduation, and section.

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Data Collection

We gather data on everything from when an alumnus/a graduated to what their personal interests are

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Data Collection cont.Our “interests” field

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Data Use

With this data—as earlier slides conveyed—we’re able to send targeted tweets to alumni based on their interests.

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Data Use

This data-driven approach allows us to engage with alumni around almost any topic…and by “any topic” we mean any topic.

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“The Case of the Panda”

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“The Case of the Panda” cont.

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“The Case of the Panda” (cont.)

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Reporting and disseminating the data

-Each interaction with an alumnus/a is “scored” on a tracking spreadsheet: 1-2 “touches” a month equals “minimally engaged”; 2-4 “touches” a month equals “moderately engaged”; and 5 or more “touches” equals “highly engaged.”

-Interactions are retweets, favorited tweets, or original tweets by individual alumni.

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Reporting and disseminating the data cont.

More than 5 “touches” during a month makes an alumnus/a “highly engaged”

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-We also measure the connections we help make

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Reporting and disseminating the data cont

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-Twitter-based interactions are included in monthly reports.

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Our Facebook Approach

We share glimpses of campus life, news about alumni, event coverage, etc. with our alumni audience

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Our Facebook Approach cont.

In 2014, these efforts helped us generate 4,451 “likes,” 321 post comments, and 7,492 web clickthroughs, all of which is great but….what about alumni engagement?

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For this, we needed to get a little bit creative.

First, we tried to “cross the (social media) streams.”

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We identified people we had interacted with on both Facebook AND Twitter

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Then we tried to pull these alumni over” from Twitter to Facebook.

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The result, at least initially? An increase in engagement across EACH platform.

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But our success was short-lived. We tried this same approach on a number of other occasions with VERY little success…so, as they say here at HBS, we decided to “pivot.”

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We reached out to a number of alumni via a back channel (i.e., email) to participate in a chat.

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Our Facebook Approach cont

Alumni posted more than 40 individual comments during the chat!

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Our Instagram ApproachShare glimpses—via photos—of campus life, information about alumni, event coverage, etc. with our alumni.

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Our Instagram Approach cont.Monitor alumni “likes” and engage them in

conversation when possible.

If an alumnus/a “likes” a post, we usually ask him or her a related follow-up question

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Our Instagram Approach cont.Like with Twitter, we collect Instagram-related data of our alumni and use it to engage with them.

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Our Instagram Approach cont.

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By the numbers

-Since January 2013, our Twitter outreach has resulted in:

a)20,283 unique interactions with 1,539 alumni

b)5,380 new followers

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But this is my full-time job and I, like Dawson Leery, feel your pain…

…because before I came to HBS I had to balance my social media work with MANY other things.

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Naturally, it was a challenge to fit social media into the mix.

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What did I do? I sharpened my focus as much as possible on this fellow…

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…and used social media to extend the reach of the brand (i.e., the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)

1) We identified individual higher education “influencers” on Twitter.

2) We added them to a Twitter tracking list.

3) We reviewed the list regularly over the course of six months and engaged with these followers as often as possible by tweeting out their blog posts, asking them higher education-related questions, etc.

4) Once we launched our blog—we posted a new article each month—we sent direct messages to all of these influencers letting them know we had a new post.

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This outreach led to….30,000 unique page views of our blog over a one-year period.

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So, how can YOU engage your alumni on social media given limited resources—time and staffing—and other work responsibilities?

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#1: Ask the RIGHT questions and try to answer them

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-What are your social media goals?

-What platforms can help you achieve these goals?

-How are you going to illustrate the Return on Investment (ROI) of your efforts?

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#2 Develop a plan of attack

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-Who is going to be responsible for each social media platform?

-How many hours a week can you dedicate to each platform (the answer to this question may inform the platform you choose. Twitter, for example, requires much more time than Facebook or Instagram)?

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My suggestions…..

Twitter:

-Use the Twitter list function to engage with the people YOU want to have a relationship with.

-Start small if you need to. Start with 50 alumni. Follow them, share their content with your followers, and try to build a (digital) relationship with them.

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Twitter (cont.)

-Question of the Week: Ask your alumni a different question each week (making sure to include the handles of the tweeters you want to engage in the tweet(s)); collect the responses, possibly ask follow-up questions of respondents; and gather the conversation into a Storify.

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Twitter (cont.)

-Tweet of the Week: Each week, copy and paste the tweets from alumni you like onto a word document and near the end of the week, let’s say Thursday, put the tweets (with the handle of the authors) into survey monkey or another online polling platform, and have your followers vote. The top vote getters each week move onto the “Tweet of the Year” contest with a chance to win a prize of some sort at the conclusion of the contest.

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Twitter (cont.)

-Photo Contest: Invite your alumni to submit photos they have taken for an end of year photo contest. Like the “Tweet of the Year” contest, there will need to be a prize of some sort involved.

(If possible, have a photo release form process so you can own the photos for use in print materials)

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Facebook and Instagram

Experiment, experiment, experiment. Due to changes to Facebook’s algorithm, organic reach is a very difficult thing to predict so….

-Post content at different times of the day to see if this matters in terms of “likes” and “reach”

-Monitor the type of content that resonates most with your alumni. For example, we found that information about alumni receiving awards significantly outperforms our other content on both Facebook and Instagram

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Facebook and Instagram

-Take a “back channel” approach. Ask alumni—via email—to participate in

conversations on Facebook or Instagram

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Questions?

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Contact Information:

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @RobertBoc, https://twitter.com/RobertBoc

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertbochnak

Blog: https://robertbochnak.wordpress.com/

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