Marketing Officer Amy has been working as a member of the social media rota since its inception. Here, she shares some of her highlights, lessons learned and nine ways social media skills could benefit your work.

One of my favourite ever posts on LinkedIn was an old photo, found in the Sussex scrapbook on Flickr, of a room that I could not identify. Instead of not posting it because I couldn’t credit where it was taken, I asked our active alumni audience to locate it, and a long and friendly debate ensued. What’s great about LinkedIn is that the content that is suitable for our extremely engaged alumni audiences is often really relevant for our other audiences on all the other channels too.

However, since Facebook changed its algorithm and other social channels such as Instagram have more success with content sharing, it’s become more challenging to break the ‘100 likes’ mark on our Sussex page (West Pier at sunset images excepted). So I was surprised to have success with what I thought was an everyday post with a fairly average photo of the Lanes explaining how the Sussex dialect word for a lane is a ‘twitten’. Sometimes it’s just the simple, taken-for-granted ideas that resonate with our audiences.

Finally, a recent project I’ve enjoyed is incorporating more of my role in Marketing with social. We had a variety of issue-led videos that related to three of our SPRU courses, such as this one for Energy Policy. I created a list of social accounts to ‘seed out’ to – effectively just asking them to share/retweet – who might find our content useful and engaging. It was a great way to mirror the targeting of a paid campaign using organic and relevant accounts, who shared our content to their followers who were within our target audience. I was really pleased with the outcome of the campaign, as some hugely influential accounts to shared our content – resulting in high reach and engagement – and an increase in applications positively correlated to the activity. 

If you think you could contribute to our social channels with interesting or funny posts (puns always welcome!) then come and jump on the rota! Here’s 9 reasons why incorporating social media duties into your role could benefit you:

• make the content you create in your role reach more audiences and achieve results
• release our research and news stories in to the ‘wild’ to ensure it has impact
• drive traffic to your webpage and get a buzz from engagement figures going up and up
• spread your knowledge of what’s happening on campus or in our wider community with our followers
• contribute to the identity building of our university and implement your ideas on building our brand
• engage with our communities, from those on our doorstep to all over the world
• get to know and learn from other colleagues outside your team
• gain valuable digital skills to add to your repertoire which are continually in demand in every sector
• harness your personal knowledge of using your own social media to tell stories and share content, and help to innovate our social
• share what speaks to your personality and passions on influential social media accounts, which ultimately enhances the diversity of content we share.