5 free tools for social community management and growth

Here’s a list of my favourite free social media tools of the moment. I use these tools in addition to Hootsuite.

Here are my tools, what I think their most useful features are and how often I check in:

Crowdfire – Currently my favourite tool because of their recently updated Android app that perscribes actions once a day to increase engagement on Twitter and Instagram.
Tweepi – Find Twitter followers from interesting accounts so you can follow them too. Many search metrics and filters to narrow your target. I log in to this page once a month and then watch my followers climb.
Audisense – Analysis of Twitter follows/followers for any account. Learn basic characteristics such as location, demographics, and online activity by the hour, and the always useful Best Time to Tweet report that uses a
Commun.it – Follow Friday helpers, shows who your biggest new followers and most engaged followers are. Very spammy auto-DM.
Meshfire – uses AI to suggest new followers and possible posts. The mobile app is buggy on Android.

Want to see how I set up my Hootsuite Dashboard? Go here.

October 19, 2016March 13, 2017

Defining and showcasing your brand with a side order of social media

Here’s my cheat sheet to get to started building your online community. Use these tips and resources to grow your online presence.

Getting to know your own brand

You can’t promote what you don’t know.

Answer your “Big Why” in 4 words. Yes this is shorter than a mission statement, but you can do it! Now start signing your email with it!
What are your core values? Reflect on peak experiences that hit you emotionally.
Who is your hero? Who is your tribe? Tell a story about one of your heroes – this is your hook

My preferred methods of growing an audience: IRL, SM, content marketing (blog with sign up button at the end, guest posts, Q&A with segment leaders), email

Speak to people already following using the mom test

Your website

The sign up button: newsletter sign up, auto login after sign up
Send a personal email w/in 24 hrs asking why they signed up
Ask: What’s the main benefit of our product to you? If our product went away tomorrow, how disappointed would you be?
Once 40% are “very disappointed, it’s time to grow!

UX tools

CrazyEgg: See how users click and scroll through your website, where ppl are leaving your site
Optimizely lets you A/B test your message. Good for testing boosted posts on Instagram, FB
Ultimate website launch checklist
Test your site with 5 people (users think.com)
bestaboutpages.com
SEO: for every popular Google query, make content for it, read MOZ guide to SEO
Obsessively map out your channels. Plan out users here

Math

Analytics: segment, GTM
A/B: Optimizely
CRM: activecampaign
Go get users from other platforms: similarweb, import.io, email hunter
Automate emailing users when something happens (signup, unfinished basket, etc) email delivery API from Mailchimp

Hustle

Charlieapp.com, discover.ly
Finding influencers – ninjaoutreach.com, onalytica

Social Media

Instagram

quick 150 WD bio, direct CTA w memorable URL that opens to unique high value landing page (promo code)

only talk to ideal user
reply & flood #

Audisense to find audience
Canva.com to make memes
hootsuite to schedule posts

Your FB group

Get your group going by inviting engaged FB page users and newletter subscribers to join
Posts to a group always show up in people’s feed
Paid ads need a custom audience, find it with spaceship.rocks
Fanpage.karma lets you track the competition’s FB page

Twitter

Send tweets when audisense bttt tells you to
Copy followers with tweepi
Build hootsuite searches on your audience themes
RT compliments
Tweet the same thing 5x/day
tweet anatomy: picture, link, CTA
tweet lots 10-50x/day

Tumblr – youth oriented, only go here if your audience is here

Pinterest – if you blog about beautiful things, audience is female 30+, remove any pin not repinned 6x in 48 hrs

Reddit – search for your niche, post in 10 subreddits

Snapchat – v. important if your company = your personal brand

Community mgmt

Not on Sunday night
Use hootsuite
Shorten links using bitly or owl.ly to track what works/doesn’t work

October 30, 2015November 19, 2015

Getting ready to be a “Career Paths Outside Academia” panelist

Pathways to Success is a graduate student conference hosted by Co-op and Career Services. The number of students finishing graduate degrees outpaces the opportunities in more traditional academic career tracks, and UVic has to help new grad prepare for this reality.

While I have an MSc in biochemistry from UVic and I worked in the field for almost a decade, I transitioned to a career in student affairs six years ago. People are often curious to hear how I managed this transition. Co-op and Career Services contacted me to help out on a panel discussing how to transfer skills from an academic environment to other opportunities.

I’m going to use this post as a whiteboard to store my ideas as I prepare for the panel. First, the moderator will ask me and the other two panelists to situate ourselves in terms of education, career and current role.

My role

Web and Communications coordinator for the Office of the Registrar (OREG). This office belongs to Student Affairs, so I consider myself to be a student affairs professional. This helps me to tap into the professional organization associated with this role. My communications role is both external and internal facing. I manage the content at uvic.ca/current-students, /registrar, /safa, /summer, and askuvic.ca as well at the @uvicregistrar twitter account. I also edit a newsletter that goes out across campus every month. I also produce print and digital material to let the campus know how OREG can serve them.

Work environment

I work in an open concept office with lots of pods of desks. I have my own office but it can get noisy as some groups prefer to have standup meetings in their clusters. It’s a big office, employing over 100 people.

One thing that surprised me when I started was that everyone was wearing headphones. I had always interpreted this as a red flag for problems in the office, but in this case it appears to be just a mechanism to cope with the noise.

Of course it goes without saying that working on campus lends itself to a great work-life balance. It’s easy to head over to CARSA or around the chip trail at lunch.

Work culture

Everyone in OREG worked together to develop a team charter and one of my first jobs when I joined to office was to put these values on a poster that is prominent all over the office, so I feel like people are very aware of how they fit in to the bigger OREG picture.

Three employee groups work together (two unions and management), so you need to know what is appropriate timing-wise. Some people work longer hours and others are on a modified work week. It can be difficult to co-ordinate meetings or even a coffee break with colleagues.

There’s a lot of committee work, and at first I was surprised by how this affected the pace of work.

How my workday is structured

I work about 35 hr/week Monday-Friday. Because I look after the social media for the office, my phone never really leaves my side. I check in at breakfast and then throughout the day until about 10 pm. Because these check-ins generally take less than 5 min, I don’t count overtime. I spent most of my time either in my office working on projects and triageing email. I spend a couple of hours per day in meetings.

Recruitment process

UVic posts jobs on all the common job boards, but I was first hired through a personal connection. I started on a three-month contract that got extended into a permanent position. I leveraged the experience I gained in that role to get my current job.

toolkit

Questions to expect

Please describe your work and how it contributes to the success of your organization

My work help future and current students find the information they need to earn their degrees.

What are some of the most valuable skills in your work? Which kind of experiences enabled you to develop these skills?

My most valuable skill is to be able to listen to what people need. I am in one or two meetings a day where I am gathering requirements. I am helping to get information online for a procedure and rule-oriented group. Being able to translate what needs to be said into a format that is friendly enough for a first-year student to understand while still being accurate. My work as an academic advisor helped hone this ability as I heard the common types of questions over and over.

I have administered a number of large surveys, so an affinity for a giant Excel spreadsheet is valuable when it comes to analyzing the results. My science background is definitely an asset here.

What are some of the challenges and rewards in your line of work?

Feedback about my work can sometimes feel overly negative. I certainly experienced it this way when my first website went live. I now know to expect this and that it is simply a way that feedback sometimes comes in.

Rewards come in finding the heroic student stories that are out there and getting the word out. One of the OREG work-study students stopped by the office to say goodbye on her graduation day. She brought along her Mum who had flown for the first time from Nigeria for the ceremony. We were able to get a photo of her standing with UVic’s Chancellor and Registrar to share.

What are some of the important steps on your career path?

Deciding to leave science and get into a field where I could interact with a bigger variety of people. Gaining a technical skill set. Always learning. Being honest with myself.

Please describe how your graduate studies influenced your career development.

It helped me to mature and become confident enough in my skills that I know I’ll succeed along whichever path I choose.

What kinds of experiences would you encourage for anybody pursuing a career in your field?

Figure out what the trends are and teach yourself these skills. Either through one-off courses or on your own time. Build a portfolio of projects.

October 28, 2015November 9, 2022

CSC 595 “Research Skills” Elevator Pitch Day

CSC 595 is a required course for computer science graduate students that teaches new researchers how to choose a research method, prepare for and present a research talk, prepare a research proposal, do a literature search and evaluate research.

As part of their course requirements, students worked to polish and deliver their elevator pitches. The instructor is one of my mentors and the past-chair of the UVic computer science department, Sue Whitesides. Sue and I had pulled off many successful intrustrial networking events together and she was confident that I could show the students how to sell themselves in seconds. No pressure.

Looking around the classroom as we waited to start, I took in the diverse crowd and tried not to feel intimidated. I’m pretty sure any number students seated in the room could have out-pitched me! No matter, I kicked off the class off with my own elevator pitch. It was over in just under two minutes. Here’s how I did it.

Who are you?

Keep it short. What would you most want the listener to remember about you?

What can you do?

Here is where you state your value phrased as key results or impact. To organize your thoughts, it may help to think of this as your tag line, or purpose statement.

Why are you doing it?

Now it’s time to show the unique benefits that you and/ or your company bring. Show what you do that is different or better than others

What are your goals?

Describe your immediate goals. Goals should be concrete and realistic. Include a time frame. This is the final step and it should be clear to the listener what you are asking of him or her.

Vocabulary

Use words that show what you do instead of tell: advanced, approved, authoritavie, certified, confirmed, dominant, early, endorsed, established, finest, foremost, inaugural, inceptive, key, responsive …

Practise practise practise so you don’t repeat words or ramble, but be careful not to sound like you’re reciting off a script.

Be flexible. If your audience asks a question or looks like he or she wants to interrupt, be willing to go in a new direction. After all, the pitch is designed to start a conversation. If that conversation starts sooner, well done!

October 8, 2015March 7, 2018

Digital storytelling as a community engagement method

I was lucky enough to get a seat in the recent Community University Engagement workshop “Research with Community:
Digital Storytelling as Method and Engagement” hosted by ISICUE and UVic Fine Arts.

I was hoping to learn more about using visual methods and digital storytelling to engage communities.

The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Tamara Plush, whose research focuses on how participatory video can raise citizen voice in international development contexts. Tamara has worked in Africa and South East Asia facilitating a multi-day (or week) process that she condensed into a half-day workshop.

Here’s an example of how Tamara has used participatory video and elements of good practice for using videos to build agents of change:

We broke into groups of four and followed Tamara’s framework where there is a prompt that helps the individual experience inform the collective central theme. This is followed by the creation of a story arc and then a two-phase storyboarding process. This approach emphasizes the building of empathy from the personal to the group and then to the policy maker.

The prompt: Tell a story about a challenge you’ve faced in your work around community engagement.

We reflected individually and then discussed to pull out a central theme:

“Recognizing the imbalance of power that’s inherent when you have a diversity of the participants”

If we’d had time, we would have also come up with some visuals to represent the theme. Care needs to be taken to make sure that the personal experiences connect to the theme.

I opted to be totally engaged to the process instead of trying to divide my attention by capturing our progress on camera. Thankfully, Tamara provided more resources on her site that are useful to fill in the details about the techniques we used to work out the story arc and storyboard.

Storyboarding: Phase I

My group brainstormed how to tell the story that would illustrate our theme using sticky notes and then arranging the sticky notes onto pages labelled with one of four icons.

[👂] Who should hear the story?

[🤔] What do you hope they will think?

[😀] What should they feel?

[🗣 🗯] What is the dialogue you want the film to spark?

Storyboarding: Phase II

Using four pieces of letter paper, we created 4 frames that would make up our film.

Remember

The video itself sparks the conversation. It can be a point of interest that enables the larger dialogue to happen – the video doesn’t need to do it all.

Tamara mentioned other creative processes that can be used to explore the topic to help create a compelling story including body mapping, looking at a collection of photos, or conducting interviews.

October 8, 2015March 15, 2017

Authentic storytelling

I’ve had more that enough time to let the dust has settle and I think I’m ready to talk about my favourite session Social Media Camp and how I plan to apply it to my personal life.

The session was called “Brand Culture and Storytelling” and the speaker was David Reeve (@unleashculture) of Unleash Culture.

David explained that every brand story has three emotional hooks: purpose, values and have a hero. This resonated with me and I saw applications both personally and professionally. I already posted about how to implement storytelling into your professional brand, and I wanted to try and capture how I see this approach as a fit for me. David shared several examples of companies that spend as much effort sharing their emotional hook as they do telling people about their product.

Can you answer your “Big Why” in four words?

Your purpose statement is similar to a mission statement except that it’s foward focused and four-words or shorter. Look for why or how you do what you do, rather than what it is that you do. Focus on your character and the things that emotional emphasis.

Here’s my personal purpose statement (it’s a work in progress): Connect with positivity

Now, the next time you meet someone at a networking event, try introducing yourself using your purpose statement. Feel totally awkward? David assured us that this is the feeling of getting the first emotional hook. A more sublte way to integrate your purpose statement is to include it in your email signature.

Define your core values

Values represent who we are not who we would like to be or think we should be. They represent your unique and individual essense and serve as a compass pointing towards what it means to be your true self. Your values can be discerned from how you live in the world and tend to show up time and time again in our lives.

Keep in mind that values aren’t core if you have to read them off a cheat sheet. You need to be able to live your values.

To help identify your values, identify special, peak moments when life was expecially rewarding or poignant, rich or fulfilling and ask yourself what was happening, who was present and what was going on. What were the values being honoured?

Conversely, look at times you were angry, frustrated or upset – these times are likely to signal when an important value was being supressed or compromised.

Luckily, I had already worked out my top core values at a previous workshop. The following is the very top of a list of 25 values that I feel are most important in my life both personally and professionally.

Individuality: Room for originality and self-reflection
Fairness: Consider all people equally
Intelligence: Acquiring and applying knowledge, skills and experience
Competence: Do things well

I know that these are my core values because when I find myself in a situation where one of these values is tested, it’s almost like I have no control over my emotional reaction. I’ve been in situations where someone is treated unfairly and my blood will boil!

Make someone a hero

Who are the heroes in my life? Currently, I have several roles that represent keys to who I am: coordinator, communicator, mother, best friend, leader. I’m energized by the impact each of these roles has.

As a secret weapon, I build on the fantastic customer service my office provides by telling the story of our student’s success via social media and traditional channels.
As my spouse’s best friend, I show my unconditional love and support by helping him achieve his professional and athletic goals.
I nurture the character and abilities of my children to the fullest by giving them dedicated one-on-one time every day.
As my Sparks unit’s biggest fan, I boost the confidence of each Spark through discovering, cultivating and recognizing their individual strengths.

Build your story

Be the chief storyteller of your life. It’s up to you and your heroes tell the world.

June 28, 2015October 30, 2015

COM 405 Website Review Day

COM 405 “Career Preparation Across Borders” is a dynamic advanced career prep course in the Bachelor of Commerce Program at the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business. The goal of COM 405 is to set each and every Commerce student up with global networks, build their resume, gain mentors, international experiences and build technical skills.

Students are required to build out a website to showcase themselves to potential employers. To help them figure out what kinds of elements to include on a personal website, they were provided with a demo website. Most students chose a Weebly template to build out from. I was invited to attend a coaching session to help students build, strengthen and showcase their own brand.

The BCOM Experiential Learning Manager and one of the course instructors, Jennifer Gill, supplied a rubric to help make sure I was providing the right kinds of feedback. Some of the students showed up with fully built out sites and others were expecting a lot more hand holding.

I shared my favourite tips on effective writing for the web and basic content layout. I also asked some of my favourite “GROW” coaching questions. These open-ended questions helped them to nail down their purpose and values, and through this, clarity about their personal brand.

My favourite component that students included was a “global mindset” page. It helped to tease out the why and how that motivated each student. By fourth year, every Gustavson Commerce student has had some sort of international experience, either as an exchange student to another institution or on an international work term.

The completed sites were revealed at the Global Leaders Festival, billed as a “reverse career fair” for employers to identify new talent.

June 1, 2015June 2, 2015

Picking a font for my OAC site

I’m a type junkie and fall solidly into the sans serif camp. While happy that UVic has kept Myriad Pro for it’s Edge roll out, I feel that whoever picked this font to start with was taking the easy road because this is the font used by Apple. Climbing on the shoulders of giants I guess.

With a free evening to set up my OAC site, obviously I concerned myself with the look of the thing as opposed to the content (don’t judge). Being a font nerd, I started with a little research that I’ll share below.

The WordPress Codex is a resource is part of the WordPress site and acts as the online WordPress manual. I started my search for the ultimate font here. The article on playing with fonts led me to a web style guide that had a great image comparing common print fonts to common web fonts. In general, typefaces designed specifically for legibility on the computer screen have exaggerated x-heights and are very robust compared to more traditional typefaces in the same point size.

I continued my search for the best font in true scientific fashion, by Googling “best fonts for wordpress.” I hit on two sites that weren’t overtly trying to get me to buy anything. I found a short guide to font selection which was a good design refresher and then paydirt! Recommendations of fonts combinations with accompanying images!

My top choices are Roboto Slab/Roboto and Quattrocento/Quattrocento Sans. I installed the Google fonts option that OAC provides and was a bit dismayed that only Roboto was on the list. At least now I’ve narrowed the field and just need to pick a header combination that rocks the most. For now I’ve picked Ubuntu. Let me know what you think.