Planning activities and measuring performance
There are several questions you must consider while planning:
BUDGET
How much money do you have for social media communication? This is especially important if you want to develop relevant and visually appealing content or outreach campaigns. Is it possible to use the content/resources you develop for social media for your other communication activities such as website and print (and vice-versa)? Note that it is always a good idea to develop an integrated communication (where all your communication formats and messages are carefully linked together).
HUMAN RESOURCES
How many people in your team can be engaged in social media communication? And for what amount of time? Will you need to train them? You should consider that human resources come and go, so having your strategy outlined in a way that you can easily convey it to someone new is an advantage.
PARTNER COLLABORATION
You must engage your nodes/hubs in the production and sharing of contents. How can this be done? This is especially important for distributed research infrastructures, as this type of collaboration may help enhance content quality and increase visibility.
Will you need to train or guide them? You should consider that your partners will be more willing to collaborate if they receive clear and simple guidelines that are “manageable” (given their own resources) and adapted to their context.
“JUICE”
How will you ensure a regular input of relevant and updated info for your contents (e.g.: new research outputs, prizes and awards, info about services and facilities, etc.)? Note that this question is key to ensure an adequate balance and quality of content, in which your social media conveys several types of content that serve different goals and collectively reinforce your branding.
RISK MANAGEMENT
How will you deal with misinformation or controversy? How will you reply to comments while maintaining the views of your research infrastructure? What type of content should you be retweeting/ reposting, and which types you should definitely avoid? Does your research infrastructure have an internal communication policy with which your social media strategy should align?
Measuring performance: How to measure your effectiveness?
Social media metrics can provide useful information that enables you to measure how effective your social media strategy is: what works, what doesn’t.
Remember that your social media strategy is a work-in-progress: there is always room for improvement, and you can add or remove types of content at any time.
There are plenty of tools and guidelines available online that you can easily adapt to measure the effectiveness of your social media. It mostly depends on how much effort you can put into this task.
TIP
Whether you make a more superficial or a more in-depth analysis, try to follow these two rules of thumb: Goal-oriented - Find specific metrics that match the goals and targets you initially defined(you may be performing great overall, and still completely miss a goal or a target audience). Big picture vs individual posts - Pay attention to the “big picture” (your overall metrics) but also to how particular posts are performing, considering the goals/targets they are aiming at.
