Social media support

Departments can contact Marketing to discuss social media accounts or to develop a social media strategy, in the first instance get in touch with the relevant faculty marketing contact:

• Arts and Humanities: Natalie Ellis and Nicole Bissett
  • East 15 Acting School: Alex Dickens
  • Edge Hotel School: Fari Manangazira
• Science and Health: Simon Greenwood and Lucy Birchall
  • School of Health and Social Care: Joanna Atherton
• Social Sciences: Becky Beard and Violet Tam
  • Essex Business School: Karla Bird

The University has an institutionally wide social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vimeo, and LinkedIn. Most departments and sections already have Facebook and Twitter accounts set up. Marketing can help departments develop their social media accounts and campaigns specifically with recruitment in mind, working alongside the institutional profiles.

What Marketing can help with

• Setting up a Facebook or Twitter account if you don’t already have one
• Creating a social media campaign to aid recruitment - this could be to promote a particular event or course, as well as to develop your online persona. Marketing can help to devise a calendar of posts, and help with content planning
• Advising on online branding and tone-of-voice
• Helping set-up a blog
• Organising a takeover of the University’s Instagram or Snapchat account for a specific time-period
• Developing your current social media accounts with fresh content ideas and advise on engaging with your audience (for recruitment purposes)
• Building a content calendar

Adopting a content strategy

One of the most common underestimations of social media management is how long it can take to think of, write and find images/video for strong social media posts. It can often feel daunting and difficult to think of something different and interesting to post, to solve this we recommend adopting a content strategy.

A content strategy will help you remember the bigger picture of what you are trying to achieve and take you through a process of matching different types of content to this and to a content calendar. We recommend breaking down content into ‘internal’ (University sourced content) and ‘external’ (student or third party sourced content).

It is also useful to create a content calendar to match content to appropriate dates and help spread out and schedule in posts for later.

When planning content, always think about:

• Who are our audiences?
• What do we want to share with them?
• Why would this content be valuable to our audiences?
• Where will they expect to find this content?
• What form of content would most suit our audience?