Keep your social media content relevant to your audience

Lewis Wake
Thursday 2 March 2017

Whether personal or corporate, social media channels develop their own voice and tone. Audiences don’t want brands talking to them as if they were dollar signs. They subscribe to channels with an expectation of authentic communication.

It’s also important to understand the key demographic of your product to achieve a successful campaign. After all, they are the driving force for mass engagement with your content. You can easily check this for your own page by using Facebook’s audience insight tool.

The majority of our Facebook pages fans are aged between 18-24 and are based within St Andrews.
The majority of our Facebook pages fans are aged between 18-24 and are based within St Andrews.

As expected for a University in the UK, our most popular audience on Facebook is aged between 18–24. Most of the pages fans are from the town itself. This tells us that 45% of our total page likes are composed of our current undergraduate students. They are the key to mass engagement with the University of St Andrews Facebook page.

Some of us in the corporate communications department, in a joint effort between the press and digital communications teams, worked on a small video project in November 2016 aiming to collate one word summaries of students’ thoughts regarding the US election. The following video was recorded and edited on the day of the election.

With a tight deadline and our skills combined, we launched this video at 5.00pm GMT on election day: a perfect time to post for maximum exposure with our audience.

The key to the success of this video was the vox populi of our own students. Friends of the people interviewed would tag each other in the comment thread thus gaining further exposure. It’s as simple as showing the people what they want to see.

The most popular video on our page is from a Facebook live stream of last year’s Raisin Monday foam fight. It is perfect viral content. Its popularity stems mainly from those that were not present, and later on those that were tuning in.

Keep your social media videos topical and relevant to your community.

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