Michigan Tech Social Media Blog

Month: February 2022

Instagram Live 101

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Person smiling while holding their phone vertically with their hand up as if saying hello to someone.

Instagram Lives allow you to share the excitement of important events in real time. If you don’t delete it, it stays up for 24 hours.

The ideal duration of an Instagram Live depends on the event. You can broadcast for up to an hour, but typically viewership falls off after the first 10 minutes.

Why Use Instagram Live

  • Capture the excitement of “being there.”
  • Reach current and prospective students.
  • Interact with existing followers and grow your audience.

What Makes This Platform

  • Include plenty of faces.
  • Keep it short and fun.
  • Share instantly to Facebook Stories.
  • Monitor comments in real time.

What Breaks This Platform

  • It will go away unless you save it to your camera roll to repost.
  • Typically low engagement for new accounts with few followers.
  • Bad internet connection.
  • Background distractions.

Pro Tip

Search for helpful blogs and videos to learn new techniques that make posting easier and more effective, like this Instagram expert. Also, learn from the app itself — Instagram Live instructions from Instagram.

Examples

  • Human ice bowling
  • Broomball drop
  • Campus life
  • Career Services Q&A

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Live Tweeting 101

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Share presentations and conversations during workshops, keynotes, and presentations to pull in the audience who couldn’t be there and connect to individuals and groups elsewhere interested in the subject matter with Live Tweets. Science and Research Twitter are huge!

Plan for five to 10 tweets per event.

Why Live Tweet

  • Feature events and show spaces, people, or equipment.
  • Connect with scientific and government communities, who tend to prefer Twitter.
  • Build up your Twitter following.
  • Embed videos on department and project websites.

What Makes This Platform

  • Engage with a live audience interested in your topic.
  • Spread information beyond the single event.
  • Connect with niche audiences through hashtags and tagging.
  • Retweet interesting comments from your followers to keep the conversation going.

What Breaks This Platform

  • Can be boring. Use images, memes, and jokes when appropriate to keep attention level high.
  • Snark and rudeness are part of the Twitterverse. Monitoring required.
  • Multitasking a must (simultaneously type fast and pay attention).
  • Algorithm doesn’t favor accounts who don’t have thousands of followers.

Pro Tips

Pre-load intro and conclusion posts, and have applicable links, handles, and hashtags ready to copy, paste, and post on your device. Also, check out live Tweeting tips from the platform itself — Live Tweeting Tips from Twitter.

Examples

Questions?

Feel free to direct any questions you may have about Live Tweeting or social media in general to University Marketing and Communications social media staff at social@mtu.edu. We are happy to help!

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The (Linked)Ins and Outs of Posting Jobs on Social Media

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Students in this 2018 Career Fair photo are able to go straight to employers to talk about job listings. University positions, however, follow a format outlined by our HR department.

Michigan Tech’s main social media platforms are used for marketing, public relations, and communications for prospective and current students and alumni as well as partnering funding agencies, governments, and industries who support our research mission. 

Individual departments and other campus units have listed/advertised open positions on LinkedIn Jobs previously with permission through Human Resources. Job listings are an entirely separate function from what our social media team does and more like using Indeed or other digital job listing services.

Here’s an article about the job listing and recruiting functionality LinkedIn offers on its platform. Our Michigan Tech Alumni LinkedIn group frequently posts jobs and other opportunities, as do Alumni networks on Facebook — most of those options are private groups and you need permission to join. You can check with them to see how the groups are administrated and moderated.

We have seen many folks post the links from Human Resources job listings on their personal or departmental accounts to help get the word out to quality candidates about job openings. Sharing the HR link is a solid idea because it ensures the listing is in compliance with legal requirements and University hiring procedures.

Keep the social media questions coming to the University Marketing and Communications editorial team at social@mtu.edu. We’ll get to as many as we can as fast as we can.

For more tips, check out our social media field guide.

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The Magic 7: Your Go-Tos For Social Media Content

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There are as many ways to present your owned and earned content on social media as there are shades of blue.

We call it the Cerulean Belt Effect. Content presented on your blog, webpages, in your annual newsletter, at a conference, in an email—anywhere—is not a one-and-done. Present it distinctly, in many shades of the same hue, in many ways. Get it in front of different eyes in different spaces. 

In other words, don’t reinvent the wheel. Repackage, repurpose, and share your content everywhere.

As homage to the time-honored marketing rule of seven, check out seven ways, listed in order of importance, to mine content from what has already been created:

7) Your own blogs and web pages 

6) Michigan Tech YouTube

5) Michigan Tech News and Unscripted 

4) Google Alert (set one for your College, Institute, or Department)

3) Faculty accomplishments, teaching honors, and conferences

2) Flickr (Michigan Tech and other University-related accounts)

1) Student stories

Here’s another take on the Rule of Seven (and rethinking alphabetical lists) from marketing guru Seth Godin and more social media posting resources and more blog goodness from your UMC team.

Keep the social media questions coming to the University Marketing and Communications editorial team at social@mtu.edu. We’ll get to as many as we can as fast as we can. For more tips, check out our social media field guide.

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