Continued growth across our channels
- Report Date
- August 2020
Quarter 4
Our social media channels and newsletter have been more important than ever in updating our audiences with news and opportunities.
We've seen a general slight reduction in engagement in our newsletters this quarter, an understandable consequences of a combination of annual leave and 'email fatigue' from home working.
Reflections on 2019/20
The two most successful pieces of messaging of the year were the announcements of the University's policy to allow staff and students to spend 30 minutes of the day at events about the climate crisis on the day of the climate strikes in September and the 2019-20 Sustainability Awards thread. The former received 30 retweets, 51 likes had 12,258 impressions and 185 engagements. The latter received 18 retweets and 43 likes, and gained 17,558 impressions and 449 engagements.
Targets for audience expansion
Newsletter: We aimed to increase our newsletter following to 10,000 by August 2020, having 7,865 in August 2019. We are significantly behind this target with 7,177 in Quarter 4 in 2020. We had increased our newsletter list to 8,133 by November 2019, but lost almost 550 contacts between December 2019- January 2020 due to what was believed to be Cerebro deleting expired contacts.
Twitter: We aimed to increase our newsletter following to 5500 by August 2020. We have just met this target, having 5,506 in mid-August. This is growth of 1,000 followers since Q4 2018-19.
Facebook: We aimed to have 5,000 followers on Facebook by August 2020. We currently have 4,175, significantly behind target. This is the platform we get least engagement on generally, and has been less of a priority in communicating with our students since the switch too remote working.
Instagram: Our aim was to have 3,000 followers by August 2020. We currently have 2,201, despite being behind target, this is an increase of 1,000 followers since Q4 2018-19.
LinkedIn: We currently have 557 LinkedIn followers, beating our target of 500. This is an increase of almost 220 since Q4 2018-19.
All of these targets have been impacted by our lack of events, a key method that students gain awareness from us.
Plans for 2020/21
We will be holding a Virtual Societies Fair in the first few weeks of term, where student societies related to SRS topics will “takeover” our Instagram story to describe what they do and how students can get involved. This will be a key way we engage with new and returning students and will hopefully increase our followers significantly.
Our Future Fridays campaign has been successful, with high of engagement on the posts we’ve done so far demonstrating high student interest in this area. This is also not an area many other Universities have been exploring, which gives us a niche in a crowded market.
We are also creating a video that explains how students can get involved in the department to replace the Welcome Talks. This should increase awareness of the variety of projects and will be another key way students learn of our department.