Drive Alumni Engagement With These Six Social Media Marketing Tools

alumni engagement

Driving alumni engagement is tough work! First, you have to create the content to publish to your social channels (or find the content if it’s a third-party article). Then you need to find the time to post that content to your social media channels. Driving alumni engagement on social media is a full-time gig. Lucky for us, we live in a world where talented teams create social media marketing tools to make managing your channels less time consuming and more efficient.

By using these tools, universities can spend less time dealing with the nuts-and-bolts of their social media content strategy and more time engaging with their alumni on social media.

Top Social Media Marketing Tools For Driving Alumni Engagement

Getting Content Discovered: Hashtagify

When it comes to making it easy for your alumni to find and engage with your content on Twitter and Instagram, nothing beats the tried-and-true use of hashtags. However, it’s not always clear what hashtags you should use to ensure your post gets found by the audience most likely to engage with it.

Hashtagify is an app that lets you research hashtag popularity, trends, and correlations. Use it to track the performance of hashtags you routinely use in your content or research new or relevant hashtags that you should be using in your social media marketing.

Scheduling Content To Publish On Multiple Channels: Buffer

Sure, there are dozens of content schedulers and publishers out there, but we love the simplicity of the Buffer platform. All you need to do is connect your accounts, determine your publishing schedule, and start creating content. Buffer handles the rest. Forget squeezing in those precious 5 mins to send a Tweet out to your alumni at 9 pm. Take the stress out of publishing social media marketing messages by batching the creation and scheduling of your posts ahead of time.

As a bonus, you can use their built-in Chrome Extension to top off your Buffer feed with alumni-relevant articles, pictures, and videos as you discover them online.

Finding Third-Party Content To Curate: Feedly

If you break out in hives at the mere thought of searching for alumni-relevant third-party content to share, this app is for you! Feedly collects articles from all your favorite publications, blogs, and feeds and condenses them into a single dashboard. No more having to go to 10 different websites to find that perfect article to share with your alumni. Their powerful search functionality allows you to quickly scan dozens of articles for mentions of your university, athletics program, or any subject your alumni would find interesting.

To sweeten the pot even more so, Feedly integrates with Buffer, allowing you to schedule posts to Buffer from within the Feedly app.

Creating Stunning Images: Canva

Social media is a visual medium. Image-based Facebook posts see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. If you want to drive alumni engagement on social media, you need to publish images alongside your posts. The trouble is, not everyone is an amazing photographer or has access to top-notch design resources. That’s where Canva can help.

Through Canva, social media marketing managers can upload an image and stylize it with their choice of thousands of potential layouts. Built-in templates, fonts, color swabs, and style filters can turn even the most boring image into social media gold.

Editing Video On The Go: Splice

How many times have you used your iPhone to shoot a quick action shot of your latest alumni event, only to have to wait until you got back to your desktop before you could get to work editing the footage into something shareable? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could simply edit the video on your mobile app and share it right there at the event? Of course, it’d be!

Splice is a video-editing tool built by the good people of GoPro. Through Splice, iOS users can edit, trim, and crop their footage. They can also apply filters, animations and even customize audio. Drive more engagement by creating beautiful videos without having to use complex and costly editing software.

Amplifying Your Content On Social Media: SocialToaster

Alright, we admit, we’re a bit biased here. But we firmly believe that if you want to amplify the reach and engagement of your great social media marketing content, an advocacy marketing program managed with SocialToaster is the tool for you! Through SocialToaster, your university can leverage the social sharing power of your alumni network to help disseminate your content from coast to coast.

As alumni share your content to their personal social networks, their friends and family can then interact and view that content as well. The result: increasing your content’s visibility without having to promote or boost your post.

Want to learn more? Check out: The University’s Guide To Advocacy Marketing With SocialToaster or schedule a demo with a SocialToaster Alumni Engagement Strategist today!

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