Social media is a valuable business tool and using it for an organization is very different from having a personal account. Running a successful social media strategy requires planning, creating graphics, writing, scheduling, responding and tracking. It takes a significant amount of time to efficiently maintain a social media account. 

If you think social media is a useful tool for your department, consider the following questions:

1. Do you have enough content?

One of the most important characteristics of a successful social media account is consistency. An account that is seen to be inactive, or seldom posting, gives the impression that your office or department no longer exists or is outdated and out of touch with the modern world.

If you commit to a having a social media account, the following posting frequencies are recommended:

• Facebook   One to seven posts per week.
• Instagram  Three to seven posts per week
• Twitter      Three to five posts per day.
• Snapchat   One to five posts per day.
• LinkedIn    One to five posts per week.
• YouTube    One post per month.

2. Is your content high quality, unique, shareable, and valuable to your audience?

Successful accounts offer valuable content to their audiences. Ask yourself, is your content entertaining? Informative? Relevant?

Put thought and time into each post. Consider what your audience wants to see. Keep to the 80/20 rule - your content should be no more than 20% promotional. The other 80% engaging should be engaging, entertaining, and authentic. Wanting to promote events is not a justification for creating a social media account.

If you do not have enough quality content to maintain your own account, consider that your department might be better served by requesting that an umbrella account share their content. Departments should request that their college share their content, student organizations can request that the Cardinal Activities Board or Student Services share on their behalf and administrative departments can appeal to the main Lamar University accounts.

3. Do you have resources?

As social media becomes more popular, it also becomes more crowded. You have less than a second to capture the attention of someone scrolling through their feed and there are very few instances where text-only posts will be valuable or effective. The majority of your posts should include a quality image or video along with a link.

4. Does having a social media account benefit Lamar University?

It’s important to remember that your account will represent the university. As faculty and staff, we perceive certain boundaries between our areas of work. Our audiences, however, perceive any part of LU to represent the entire university. As you participate in social media, remember that your successes and failures have the power to benefit (or harm) Lamar University.