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Balancing Acts: Managing Your Social Media Work With Your Other Professional Responsibilities 

I’m a lucky guy. I have a wonderful wife, healthy children, a nice home, good friends, and rock-hard abs.

Okay, that last one was a lie. My abs are far from “ripped.”

But the truth is I’m pretty fortunate, and this fortune extends to my job at the Harvard Business School (HBS). The position lets me to focus primarily on social media-related work, an area that I’m quite passionate about–evident in the posts I’ve penned on the subject since starting this blog in August.

But it hasn’t always been this way. Before HBS, I worked at the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for thirteen years as a senior writer/communications manager. In this role, I managed social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and the GradMatters blog) for the school and also served as managing editor/contributing writer of an alumni magazine; writer of a monthly e-newsletter; project manager/writer on various marketing projects; and communication liaison for all Arts and Sciences graduate departments at Tufts.

While I thoroughly enjoyed this job, it wasn’t always easy to balance my social media work with my other responsibilities—a challenge, I’ve found, that many communications professionals encounter. But, with time and experience, I was able to find a way to “make it work,” as Tim Gunn would say, and in this blog post I’ll share some tips for how you can too.

Start Small

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know that I’m pretty obsessive about Twitter lists.  Having a list, or lists, of people you want to engage with is critical, in my opinion, to social media success. But when it comes to building and managing these lists, time is always an issue. As a full-time social media professional, I’ve been able to dedicate the hours necessary to develop and monitor several lists which, put together, come to about 7.000 individual “tweeters.”

While I didn’t have the bandwidth necessary to create large lists in my previous position, I was able to assemble smaller lists. Therefore, for the communications professional with limited time at his or her disposal, I suggest identifying a select group of tweeters–whether it’s 10, 50, or 100–to follow, add to a list, and engage with on a regular basis. In time, this list can be expanded, but it’s probably best to start small and then expand your efforts as you become more comfortable with the monitoring/engagement process.

Let Someone Else Do the Work…Or At Least Some of It

What do Dunkin’ Donuts, GPS technology, and user-generated content all have in common? Besides being awesome, these three seemingly disparate items all make my life a lot easier. While I could blog about all three (full disclosure: I’m pretty much a D&D coffee addict. Seriously, it’s becoming a problem), for this post I will focus on user-generated content. User-generated content, as the name implies, is any material produced by your social media audience. This can include tweets in response to a question, photos, blog posts, etc.

For the always busy communications pro, this content can save you valuable time AND give your audience the impression that you’re much more active on social media than you really are. Below are some examples of user-generated content that is fairly easy to collect.

Question of the Week: Ask your followers a different question each week (making sure to include the handles of the tweeters you want to engage in the tweet(s)); collect the responses, possibly asking follow-up questions of respondents; and gather the conversation into a Storify.

Tweet of the Week: Each week, copy and paste the tweets you like onto a word document and near the end of the week, let’s say Thursday, put the tweets (with the handle of the author) into survey monkey or another online polling platform, and have your followers vote. The top vote getters each week move onto the “Tweet of the Semester” contest with a chance to win a prize of some sort at the conclusion of the semester.

Photo Contest: If you work with undergraduate or graduate students, invite them to submit photos they have taken for an end of year photo contest. Like the “Tweet of the Semester” contest, there will need to be a prize of some sort involved, but there are some definite advantages to pursuing an initiative like this. 1) If students sign a release form, essentially giving your college or university the right to use the images, you can publish the best photos online and/or in your print materials. We ran a contest like this at Tufts and, as you can see, we had some very talented photographers. 2) you can generate quite a bit of engagement by having the student body and alumni vote for the winning photos via survey monkey or Facebook and 3) the students do most of the work–taking and sending in the photos–and all the communications staff member needs to do is create the releases (something that really only needs to be done once, since the form can be slightly edited each year); manage the photo submission process; and set up the voting platform.

Start a Blog (Seriously)

Blogging may be the last thing a communications professional wants to do, especially when tweeting on a regular basis is hard enough. But there is a way, borrowing from the user-generated model above, to make blogging at least once a month a worthwhile endeavor that isn’t too time-consuming.

While at Tufts, I noticed that the tweets which received the most clickthroughs were those that directed followers to articles on career-related topics. After my supervisor and I reviewed the data, we decided to start GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts’ GSAS  as a way to provide this career counsel ourselves. We did have a few small problems, though. First and foremost, I wasn’t an expert in higher ed-related topics and, second, I didn’t really have the time to blog.

But, we did have one thing going for us.

We had a network of alumni willing to help out.

With this alumni support, my supervisor and I proceeded to develop a dozen or so story ideas and then I reached out to members of my network via email. These emails consisted of four to five questions and once I had a critical mass of responses I sat down and reviewed them in search of some common themes. Once this “research” process was complete, I created blog posts around the quotes that alumni submitted. (It’s important to note that audience participation is a crucial aspect of this blogging process. Personally, I would not have been able to pursue blogging if I had to interview each individual alumnus/a, transcribe their responses, and then write the posts. In this case, the user-generated content (i.e., emailed responses) made GradMatters possible.

The following is an example of how I used material provided by alumni.

While writing and editing these posts took more time than my other social media work, our blog was a success on many levels. The posts were valuable resources for current students and alumni, and also helped us expand the brand of Tufts GSAS outside the walls of the university. This was evident in both the amount of page views the blog received (by the time I left Tufts, the blog had garnered 30,000 unique page views in a year-and-a-half)  and its social media traction (see below).

Therefore, while blogging can be time consuming, it can also have a big impact within and outside your organization and is something all social media managers should at least consider.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Making the Case: Explaining the Return on Investment (ROI) of Your Social Media Efforts

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” —Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.

When thinking about social media ROI, the quote above makes a lot of sense. Like Justice Stewart, I “know” social media engagement when I see it–whether it’s in the form of interactions on Twitter, comments on Facebook, or “likes” on LinkedIn–and I also recognize when it isn’t there. But “seeing” isn’t really enough. Because regardless of how much engagement I’m able to generate (or not), one question is always there.

“What does social media engagement even mean?”

In this post, I’ll answer this question by sharing best practices I use–most notably through Twitter–to measure and translate social media engagement. Granted, these approaches may not work for everyone, but I hope some of the broad concepts I share can be applied to fields beyond higher ed/alumni affairs.

What Do You Want to Measure?

In my “Rules of (Twitter) Engagement” post, I shared the benefits of using a tracking sheet to measure clickthroughs, retweets, and other interactions via social media. Along with this tracking mechanism, I also have an engagement spreadsheet which gauges how frequently alumni, my target audience, interact with me. This measurement tool is based on this VERY basic formula.

 1-2 social media touches a month=Minimal Engagement

 3-4 social media touches a month=Moderate Engagement

 5 or more social media touches a month=High Engagement

“Touches,” in my formula, is any Twitter-related contact an alumnus/a has with me in a given month. This includes everything from an alumnus retweeting a post to an alumna responding to one of my “Questions of the Week” with a tweet of her own. One limitation of this approach, I concede, is that these social media interactions are not “weighted” in any way; a favorited tweet is given the same “score” as an original tweet in response to a query, but this is a deficit I hope to rectify in the future.

Well before I adopted the approach above, my supervisor and I sat down to figure out what we wanted to measure and, more importantly, what we could measure. One thing we couldn’t gauge, for example, was alumni engagement via Facebook. We couldn’t determine, with any real accuracy, if our alumni were the ones who “liked” a post or if they, as opposed to another “fan,” were the ones checking out the article links we posted.

Therefore, the first step in determining social media ROI is deciding who, or what, you want to gather data on. There really isn’t any right or wrong answer, but the important thing to keep in mind, as I stated before, is to make sure that what’s important to you can be measured.

Collecting and Interpreting the Data

Once my boss and I decided what we wanted to track (in this case engagement with alumni who graduated before 1997–i.e., young alumni–and those who graduated after this date) I began to track interactions in earnest. Here’s a glimpse, with certain personal information omitted, of my alumni tracking sheet.

First Name	Last Name	Handle	Program/Graduation Info	Touches	Status	Category
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	3	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	4	Moderately Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	5	Highly Engaged
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	6	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	6	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	8	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	10	Highly Engaged	YA
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	10	Highly Engaged
First Name	Last Name	Twitter Handle	Program	49	Highly Engaged

This information was, and still is, collected on a monthly basis and at the conclusion of each month I aggregate this data into the following report.

Young Alumni (YA) Engagement on Twitter		Growth/Loss Over the Previous Month
Highly Engaged	35	,+5
Moderately Engaged	36	,-3
Minimally Engaged	118	,-13
Total Number of YA Engaged	189	,-11
Highest Number of Touches by a YA	53	First Name, Last Name
Total Number of Touches by HBS Alumni	713 (by 224 individual alumni)	,+168
(YA and 16 years + alumni)

With this report, I can assess overall alumni interactions via Twitter and fluctuations, for the better or for the worse, compared to previous months. This report is also helpful when explaining my social media efforts (i.e., exhibiting the ROI of my social media work) because I can say with confidence how engaged alumni are overall and how involved individual alumni are (since I collect contact information for each alumnus/a who has interacted with me). While this ROI exercise is far from perfect (e.g., it’s virtually impossible to determine how this social media engagement correlates with, let’s say, increased giving) it has helped me justify what I’m doing and why, most importantly, it matters.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Social Media Event Coverage: An Integrated Approach (Part 2)

After weeks–and even months–of planning your event has finally arrived and it’s time to put your social media plan into action.

Before I start my coverage, I make sure to have the following indispensable items close by:

1. Laptop

2. Camera

3. Twitter event tracking sheet

4. A ridiculously large cup of coffee

On event day, I arrive at the venue at least an hour in advance and set up my laptop. The first thing I do is log onto Twitter and check my event tracking list (for more on Twitter event lists, click here) to see if there has been any activity (i.e., event-related tweeting) overnight or that morning. If there has been, I either retweet these updates or use them as engagement opportunities. Some examples are below.

Once the event begins in earnest, I commence my live-tweeting. In this role, I provide as much “on the ground” coverage of the event as possible, which includes posting photos, tweeting cogent points from speakers, and retweeting posts by alumni or students attending the event. A glimpse of this coverage is below.

(As an aside, I use a handheld camera to take event photos, as opposed to my smartphone. This is a bit of a hassle since I need to download each photo I take onto my laptop before posting it on Twitter. Therefore, the images are not published in real-time, but the slight delay is worth it since the images from my handheld are of much better quality than those I take with my Android.)

Widen the Net

While live-tweeting is a constant during any event I cover, I also look for engagement opporunities with alumni who are not in attendance. This is usually where my tracking sheet comes in. In my “Rules of (Twitter) Engagement” post, I cover this tracking mechanism in detail. In short, every alumnus/a who interacts with us via Twitter (e.g., through a retweet, response to a question we have posed, etc.) gets added to an excel spreadsheet I manage. This sheet includes the name of each alumnus, their Twitter handle, and the biographical information each has included in his or her Twitter profile. With this information, I am able to reach out to Twitter followers and “bring them into the fold.”

An example of this occurred during our spring reunion when the dean mentioned “Field,” a program which gives students valuable experience outside of the Harvard Business School, during his opening address. With the dean’s comments, and a tweet by Avni Thompson, in mind, I “pushed” a question out to alumni whose “Field” experience was still fresh. So, I pulled up my tracking sheet, searched for alumni who graduated a few months earlier, and then sent out a tweet which included the handles of these recent graduates.  The result? Two of the four alumni I reached out to responded to my tweet within 30 minutes and these tweets helped “break up” all of the live-tweeting I was doing.

The following is another example of this outreach approach. As I was preparing to live-tweet from one session, I pulled up my tracking sheet and searched for the word “founder.” Once I found alumni who self-identified as company “founders,” I asked them what dilemmas they had encountered along the way. Again, I was able to broaden the scope of my event coverage by including alumni who were far from the event (for example, Roberto Charvel was tweeting from Mexico during the reunion).

Don’t Forget Those Who Are in “Da House”

While it’s great to engage non-attendees, it’s also vitally important to interact with alumni who are actually at your event. The first step I take in this process is monitoring the hashtag I’ve created for the event, as well as any Twitter event lists I’ve assembled (for more on event list management, see part 1 of my event coverage series). 

Below is an example of how I engaged with one alumnus during our spring reunion.

Another great engagement tool is posing a question to event participants. In this case, I check my Twitter event list, see who has been actively tweeting, and then pose my question.

 

Have A Sense of Humor

For the most part, the events I cover are “serious business.” Breakout sessions and panels focus on everything from work/life balance to advice for switching careers. But, like all my social media work, I believe it’s important to have a sense of humor from time to time. Some ways I’ve tried to be funny, or at least mildly amusing, are below.

Get an Early Start on Your Storify

As you may have noticed, I tweet A LOT during events and also aggregate tweets using Storify. Following an event–usually within an hour or so after it ends–I publish my Storify. If you are planning to follow a similar approach, I would suggest getting an early start. I typically use my lunch break to get the Storify started so by the time the event is over I can publish it fairly quickly and move on to post-event coverage, which will be the subject of the last segment of my event coverage trilogy.

Coming next week: Part 3

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Social Media Event Coverage: An Integrated Approach (Part 1)

In 1984, the film “Breakin’” was released much to the delight of my then ten-year-old self. The movie followed break dancers Ozone (Adolfo Quinones) and Turbo (Michael Chambers) as they, along with jazz dancer Kelly/Special K (Lucinda Dickey), clashed with a rival crew, Electro Rock, as well as Kelly’s dance instructor who disapproved of the duo’s “street dancing.” Naturally, as children living in a suburb outside of Boston my friends and I were immediately drawn to this unique dance style and decided to try it ourselves.

This was a very bad idea.

We were, to quote Ty Webb from Caddyshack, “not good,” and this was definitely the case when three of my “breakin'” friends and I performed during a school talent show. As individuals, we were passable dancers, but together on stage we looked disorganized and disheveled, like we hadn’t practiced at all–which was true. Our plan in the days leading up to the performance was to jump onstage, do “our thing,” and exit to the frenzied cheers of our classmates in the audience.

This, of course, didn’t happen. We were awful and we exited, with our heads down, to a smattering of applause–most of which came from our parents.

Now, let’s compare the experience above to my wedding reception. My wife and I decided to choreograph our first dance as a married couple. So, “we” took lessons (I’ve put “we” in quotation marks because my wife is a trained dancer and didn’t need any help in the dance department) and we practiced frequently. I even carried around a sheet of paper with all the dance steps written on it so I could study when I had a few free moments. With help from all this preparation, our dance was a success. And when it was over, my wife and I proceeded to our seats…to, yes, the frenzied applause of everyone present.

So, what does my childhood break dancing failure and my later dance floor redemption have to do with covering events via social media?

A lot, actually.

Because what ten-year-old Robert didn’t understand and what his future self did was that important events, like many things in life, are all about planning. And in this post, the first of three on event coverage, I will discuss my approach to events and how the most important work often occurs well before you guests arrive.

The Research Phase

If you’re having an event–whether it’s in higher ed, the business world, or any other area–there’s someone, somewhere collecting RSVPs. In the case of my work at the Harvard Business School, these people are just across the hall. In my experience, these RSVP lists have been critical to the success of my social media event coverage. But simply having these names isn’t enough.

The first (and I would argue most important) step in the process, and this is a very time-consuming one, is finding out which attendees are also on Twitter (I focus on Twitter for a number of reasons, some of which I elaborate on below).

Once I have my RSVP list–typically in excel spreadsheet form–I proceed immediately to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has been a vitally important research tool for my event-related work. Using the site’s search function, I type in each attendee’s name and access their profile. If the individual has included a Twitter handle as part of his/her contact information, I follow the person and add him/her to an event list I have created in Twitter. If there is no handle included, I go directly to Twitter, search for the person’s name, and see if a corresponding Twitter handle comes up. If it does, I follow the tweeter and add him or her to the same list. Of course, this Twitter identification process is more difficult when it comes to common names.

By the end of this research process, I have lists that look like this.

For the events above–the HBS Spring and One-year Reunions–I was able to find 247 and 120 alumni, respectively, who were planning to attend either gathering. With this information, and the hashtag we developed for each event, I was able to begin my social media coverage of each event in earnest.

Conversation Starters

Two weeks before any event I’m covering, I send questions, via Twitter, to the attendees I have tracked. These questions–which for the reunions ranged from “What Do You KNOW That You Wish You Knew As An HBS Student” to “What Was the Best Thing About Your Section Or Class?”–are meant to engage alumni in conversations around an event and provide me with additional engagement opportunities (i.e., openings to extend the conversation and prolong the engagement). An example of this process is below.

Pre-event coverage like this not only helps me connect with alumni, but also provides me with a stream of user-generated content I can publish on Storify.  I can then post this original content on Facebook and LinkedIn, thus providing another outreach opportunity.

And, as I identify more individuals who are attending a particular event, I can tweet the user-generated Storify content to them AND encourage them to answer the question themselves; if other registrants do respond I can add them to the Storify as well.

The lists are also helpful beyond conversations. In the weeks leading up to an event, I can check a particular list to see if any of the registrants are discussing it. Often times, an alumnus/a will tweet that he/she have ordered their plane tickets or are looking forward to seeing specific alumni. These tweets provide yet another engagement opportunity, as evident in the example below.

Coming next week: Part 2

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Why I Recycle My Tweets and Why You Should Too

Since I began working at the Harvard Business School (HBS) in January 2013, I have sent out 821 tweets to linked content such as articles, photo galleries, etc.

How do I know this number?

It’s simple, really. I have counted and added EVERY one of these tweets to a tracking spreadsheet I created when I first started at HBS (a glimpse of this spreadsheet is below).

In a previous post titled “Rules of (Twitter) Engagement,” I discussed the merits of a tracking sheet to measure clickthroughs, retweets, and other interactions via social media.

In this post, I will share how this tracking sheet has also helped foster alumni engagement through the recycling of tweets.

Share What’s Important

The 821 tweets mentioned above pale in comparison to the total number of tweets I have posted. Since January, I’ve tweeted more than 3,000 times. These tweets have ranged from responses to questions posed by alumni to tweets related to our bi-weekly “Question of the Week”; none of these tweets included links to content. I have included a sample of these “general tweets” below.

With the sheer volume of tweets in mind, it would be nearly impossible for me to find specific tweets if I didn’t have some type of tracking mechanism in place. Without this sheet, I would have to search through my entire feed to find what I was looking for.

But why does this even matter? Or, more to the point, of what use can a tweet I sent out in the past be to me in the present? From my experience, tweets to linked content, regardless of when they were sent, can be incredibly useful in fostering alumni engagement.

To illustrate this, I have included a few examples of how I have used “old” tweets to engage my alumni audience.

In the example above, HBS alumnus Scott Harris tweeted about trust in the business world. After reading his tweet, I vaguely recalled that a fellow HBS alumnus blogged about this topic. With the help of my tracking sheet (searching by the keyword “trust”) I was able to locate my original tweet about Charles Green’s post and share it with Scott–this whole process, from finding the initial tweet to tweeting it to Scott, took under five minutes. By following this “tweet recycling” approach, I was able to 1) provide a “service” to Scott (i.e., connecting him with content based on one of his interests) while also 2) promoting Charles’ work.

And, almost as important, I was able to complete this process quickly and with little effort.

Below is another example of this alumni engagement process at work.

In this case, HBS alumna Kathy Korman Frey shared a link to “evil laughs” sometime in March. Shortly after Kathy tweeted the link, I sent a tweet asking her why the laugh of “Dr. Evil,” the antagonist from the Austin Powers films, was not included on the laugh track. Kathy responded to my tweet and I also shared the link with a fellow alumna.

Several months later, I came across an article on HBS alumnus Matt Salzberg and the success his company had in raising $5 million in funding. After I tweeted congratulations to Matt, I asked him what he had planned next for his company. His “world domination” response provided a great opportunity to share the evil laugh link that Kathy had shared. Like with the Scott Harris/Charles Green example, I searched my tracking spreadsheet for the word “laugh,” found the original tweet, and kicked off the engagement process. Again, I was able to engage with my alumni swiftly and then move onto the next engagement opportunity.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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My Favorite Social Media Mistake and What I Learned from It

Everyone, at some point, makes a mistake on social media. These mistakes can range from the benign (e.g., including a broken article link in a tweet) to the more serious (e.g., posting photos from a party in college*). And don’t even get me started on a former congressman’s multiple social media missteps or even those of one of the biggest pop sensations in the world–-come on, Biebs. As a Canadian, you have to know that the LAST people you want to upset are hockey players; people so tough that they come back and play in the SAME PERIOD after taking a puck to the face.

But whether your errors are big or small (hopefully, it’s always the latter) you can learn a lot from social media faux pas. In this post, I will share a specific social media mistake I made, what I learned from it, and how it changed my approach to one platform in particular.

Always Check Your Dates

I had only been working at the Harvard Business School for a few months when I came across a Mashable article titled, “44 Female Founders Every Entrepreneur Should Know.”  Reading through the article, I noticed that several HBS alumni were on the list. This was great news, since I had been on the lookout for content on alumni. So, with this particular article in mind, my social media “plan” was put in motion. I tweeted the link to classmates of each alumnus/a who made the list, included an “Alumni Career News” update on LinkedIn, and posted a message on Facebook promoting our alumni and the article.

I did all of this on May 6, 2013.

The only problem was that the article was dated August 6, 2012.

In my haste to share the article on social media, I had neglected to review its publication date–definitely rookie mistake. I was informed of my error several hours later by a well-meaning tweeter.

While I cursed myself out for making such an obvious error, something interesting was happening, especially on Facebook. My social media mistake was turning into the most popular item that I had posted on Facebook, evident by the statistics below.

Likes: 46

Link Clickthroughs: 368

Comments: 3

Shares: 13

Total Interactions: 430

I was pleasantly surprised (okay, okay I admit it. I was pretty “pumped and jacked,” as Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll would say) by these numbers. Up to this point, our top post on Facebook had resulted in only 169 total interactions.

But was this a social media anomaly? Was it something I could replicate–the result, not the error? Soon after the data came in, I wasn’t sure. But what my social media gaffe did was help me develop a formula of sorts.

Alumni Achievement-Related Content + Facebook = Increased Activity/Engagement

Before this, I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into what I posted on Facebook. I would include information on events, articles by faculty, etc. and hope for the best. I saved my real strategic thinking for Twitter and later LinkedIn. But, after this experience, I started thinking much more about how to leverage Facebook by focusing on a particular type of content. So, with the formula above in mind. I went to work and here’s what I found.

-Of the 3,200 Facebook interactions we had after May 6, 2013, 1,127 (almost 40%) of them were generated by alumni achievement-related content.

With these numbers in mind, I can say with confidence that our alumni, at least when it comes to Facebook, respond more positively to a certain type of content. This finding influenced, and continues to do so, how I approach engagement with our alumni on this platform.

In closing, I took some important lessons away from my social media mistake, which are…

1) You will make mistakes when using social media “and that’s okay,” as Stuart Smalley would say.

2) You can (and should) learn from your social media errors. If you’re lucky, they will help change your approach for the better.

3) Look closely at the mistake/s. Are there best practices you can put into place so it/they can be avoided in the future?

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

*Note to my younger readers: Don’t put anything on Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media platform that you wouldn’t want your parents to see. Unfortunately, the “my mom is on Facebook app” doesn’t exist. Besides, the last thing you want a prospective employer to come across is a photo of you on Facebook hitting a beer bong.