Salve Regina’s Voice
Posting a posed picture with a coffee mug in hand, scrolling aimlessly on an Instagram feed filled with young influencers posing with the peace sign, and commenting with emojis. The field of social media, now more popular than ever, has gotten a bad reputation. For those working in social media, their work is often ignorantly compared to the work of an Instagram influencer. Being in control of social media is as hard as trying to communicate with a room full of babbling children. Trying to grab the attention and communicate with a variety of individuals takes strategic thinking. Katie Barrett, Salve Regina’s newest social media manager, clears up what the social media field entails. Barrett has been in the social media marketing field for almost a decade now and has moved with the evolving social platforms. Having started for a local Newport newspaper, the Newport Mercury to a social media coordinator for Embrace Home Loans, Barrett has a great amount of experience.
Q: What does a typical day for you look like as a social media manager?
A: So the first thing I do when I get in, obviously after I check my emails, is I go through all of the sites and just kind of check notifications if you've got any messages or comments, and then I always keep a list. I actually have this massive whiteboard next to my desk of everything to do for the day. I'll go through and just start checking things off of that, specifically here, because there's so much going on on campus. Just kind of checking to see what events are going on, and if there's anything I should be going to on campus that day or planning on going to for the week, just for some Instagram stories or photo coverage or anything like that. And then just kind of going from there. Every day looks different.
Q: What social media channels do you manage?
A: I do all of the main Salve accounts. So it's Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, not so much YouTube, but I do have access to it, and Twitter. And TikTok.
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Q: So are these all different? Do you have different strategies for posting?
A: Absolutely. So Instagram and TikTok, I would say, are more student-facing. So that's more things going on on campus. Reminders for events and student life and prospective students too. And then Facebook, LinkedIn, or Facebook and LinkedIn are more like business partners, alumni, parents, X or Twitter. Right now it's just kind of more like athletics and news announcements. I don't really do too much on YouTube yet. I think it's just more like a place right now to house videos for anybody that's searching.
Q: How do you manage to engage with these different audiences?
A: It's a little bit of strategy planning. A lot of times, it's just a call to action, especially for Facebook, like comment on your favorite memory or comment or drop a picture of your time at Salve for alumni. So kind of asking people to engage, which sometimes you have to be careful with how you're asking because sometimes you never know what you could get back. Any kind of call to action you can put in a post isn't always a great boost for engagement.
Q: Managing a university must be different from your prior jobs, what are some of the challenges?
A: This is my third week, so it's totally just been like I said, like you said, a totally different world than the mortgage industry where I was just like managing a corporate page. So I would say right now, for me personally, there's so much going on at Salve all at once between just any initiatives I want to be focusing on versus the whole overall campus and different departments. So I've been meeting with a few different departments off the bat, just trying to figure out how I can help them, and what their goals are. And so it's just kind of aligning the university needs and then scheduling it out and just making sure I'm hitting all those things without a burning out or doing too much. I would just say just trying to hit all of those goals for everybody in a timely and professional manner. You know collab posts where you'll see it will be like Nike and Tom Brady. So I've been starting doing that with people, the mission integration, posting them, and just trying to boost their engagement in pages too. So when you do that, it shows up on their account as well. So it will show up on Salve's page and mission integrations page. So all that engagement is shared. So just trying to work collaboratively,
literally and figuratively.
Q: So what are your main goals when managing a whole university’s media?
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A: That's where it comes in with the different departments. And again, this is all stuff I've been learning in the last three weeks my initiatives at a mortgage company are totally different than this. I would say for admissions, it's prospective students or even people who are on campus too. It's kind of like these three buckets of admissions current students, family, and then alumni and donors. Like postgrad, just getting people to continue to support the university too. So a little bit of different strategy for each sector.
Q: How do you stay updated on everything?
A: I'll follow professional social media experts, I guess would be the word, that are always kind of giving updates. So we use Sprout Social to post all of our posts and so with those memberships, they normally do weekly or monthly webinars. So just anything that I see that I can learn more about, I'll sign up for those. They're normally half an hour to an hour long. So yeah, it's just constantly just keeping your eye out for the next best thing.
Q: How do you deal with a social media crisis?
A: Yeah, it's hard. So if somebody writes a nasty comment, I always struggle with if it's super hateful and mean, I will delete it. That doesn't need to be on a page. But at the same time, if it's not awful, it's just somebody's opinion. Depending on what it is. You just have to kind of let it lie there. They have freedom of speech. You might not like it or agree with it, but especially coming
as a business, you can't take your own personal opinions into it. So you can't really engage with the negativity. I mean, unless it's something really bad or it's like an actual issue and you just escalate that to whoever can help take care of it. I would say the main thing coming from any kind of business or corporate or university thing is just not to fight back, not to start an argument.
Q: Do you have a favorite part of your job?
A: I just love kind of the freedom you have to be creative for things you can kind of put your own spin on if I'm making posts or just your people's video style and even writing for captions too. It all kind of has a personal element to it. Going to age myself here, but I was in college when Instagram came out, so I was always just drawn to it and just going on and even Facebook taking pictures, like pretty pictures, and posting them on Instagram. And then I recently well, not recently, I downloaded TikTok, and then when businesses started using TikTok, I just started making TikToks my own page to kind of get used to doing it. It's not as user-friendly as people think. There's definitely a learning curve. So just learning new styles and techniques and it's an industry that's always changing too. So you have to stay on point with the algorithms and all that fun stuff.