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PSC-ED-FSA-TISD

Moderator: Christal Simms

July 21, 2016

2:00 pm CT

Coordinator: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants will be in a listen-only mode for the duration of today’s conference.

This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Jared Anderson. Sir, you may begin.

Jared Anderson: Thank you. Hi. I’m Jared Anderson, the self-proclaimed government creative. I am the Digital Operations Analyst for the Social Media Team Digital Engagement Team for Federal Student Aid.

And with me today is my colleague as well as my friend, Dr. James Copeland. He will be online answering questions that I may not be able to see or that might be in my eyeshot while I am presenting to you all.

And with that being said, I want to welcome you to the Effective Tips for Digital Engagement to Counselors, Mentors, College Access Professionals.

So our first slide is kind of a baseline. When I speak to large groups, I find that there are many different people at many different points in their content strategy and content development. And I wanted to make sure that I had a baseline where we can all start on the same launch pad.

I wouldn’t necessarily consider this presentation, this webinar to be social media or digital engagement 101. I think this probably will fall in line with like a 201 class. So there are some things that I will presume we all know, being that social media and digital engagement have been so prevalent in our business for a few years now. But I am going to try to not alienate anybody or go too far ahead in concepts that I might lose some folks.

So in that same breath, I hope this isn’t too remedial for others.

But the baseline is to provide a plain language content that anticipates customer needs and encourages them to self-serve.

I think this is like really important for is. This is a mission statement that we try to use, try to apply to all of our content as well as simplifying our content because that’s what we really want our audience to do. We want them to self-serve. We want to give them information where they can learn and apply that directly.

I’ve always kind of been under the impression that if you give people something to love you for, that they’ll give you their word of mouth. It’s kind of like Apple. Their iPhone products kind of exploded because -- from year one to year two -- because the product was really great, that their advertising campaign really wasn’t that expensive but they were really able to see a huge jump in growth even beyond what they had anticipated because word of mouth was so strong about the products.

It’s the same thing with our content. I think the goal is that the audience will see our social media content as an extension of their interest and not an interruption to that. So, you know, no matter whether you’re doing advertising or you’re just doing content, tweeting out a couple of times a day or making a couple of Facebook posts a day, the mission should be that if you post something, that it captivates a person -- well not necessarily captivates, but draws their interest, engages them, and that they learn something that they can take action from.

Well that kind of sets up like not necessarily an issue that we particularly had, but it’s one that we had to put thought into as we started putting a stronger effort into our paid media campaigns and just our general organic content is if we have great content, we have to figure out how we want to strategize in the distribution of that content.

You know, if you’re not in a community, if you haven’t joined a community and have a strong presence, you can post things multiple times a day every day all year. But if people don’t know you or know where to find your content, it’s going to be hard for them to really engage it, interact with it, and for you to have strong business insights from that.

So one thing that we’ve known -- and I have to admit, I honestly did not know but Bill Gates actually coined the term I think we’re pretty much all familiar with -- that, “Content is king.” He said in January, I believe January 20, 1996. That was kind of a surprising, cool little tidbit for me.

But recently, Jonah Peretti from BuzzFeed added a little bit of extra content to that that is relevant to today, where he said, “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.” And I thought that was kind of funny but very true.

Just to the point that we were talking about in the last slide where our distribution channels for our content need to be right, sometimes there are some who will use a Facebook post and use that same Facebook post to align with a Twitter post and thinking that their audience might be similar. But that might not necessarily be the case. And we have to be careful that we keep the same message but we might need to change it up per channel that we are using in distribution.

This really became a talking point for me and a point of discovery for me when I actually started working with this digital engagement group because specifically for the business that we do, our business is not simplistic. It can be very complicated at times. And because of that, we really kind of focus as kind of like a marketing company as well as a customer service company.

And that fork in the road that I think most businesses that engage strongly in online communities may have to deal with. They may have to figure out how they’re going to work that out. You know, while content is still being king, the importance of distribution strategy is very critical.

And I think it’s like more that quality is more important than quantity. You don’t have to always, you know, post multiple times a day. If you have a really great infographic that you want to share that you’ve developed, you know, posting that and just letting that germinate and letting that go viral, taking its time and being shared is really important than, you know, posting that one post and then having three posts behind it.

And that goes to say quality content helps you move past brand awareness and into subscribers and evangelists. So taking that same scenario, if you have a very strong infographic people will see that. It’ll interrupt their process of whatever they were doing online. And they’ll start looking at that content. They might take action and go to your website. Or they may go and look for other content that you have like that.

And if you have other points of interest in the same fashion or it may be in a different fashion but simplifying a complicated business process, then you have someone who will share, become an evangelist and share that content online -- maybe even through their different platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, or you can have subscribers or followers who will be with your brand as you continue to post.

So that fork in the road has been really kind of important. These are - on this slide I’m showing you some numbers -- 2015 customer service activity, kind of briefing that we have where it shows you our customer service activity on Facebook was 27% while our customer service activity on Twitter was 63%. That’s a very big difference.

And it goes to show the immediacy and the power of Twitter, that we can really engage with our audience and answer questions for them on Twitter more so than we do on Facebook.

But if you take a look to the right of this page, you can see the top social network referrals to , the number one is Facebook with about 68% of our traffic that goes from social media to . Second is Reddit -- to all of our surprise last year. And number three was Twitter.

Now, if you take a look at that, it might seem a little weird that we engage with Twitter more than Facebook in customer service but we have more referrals from Facebook than Twitter. And that just kind of showed us last year that our content was working very well on Facebook, where it would lead people back to our site where they would have less questions.

But on Twitter, our Twitter account seems to be more conversational, where our audience wants almost an extension of our call centers or help lines for help in the matter as well as sharing our content.

But this really shapes the way of how we utilize our audience, our platforms, our audiences on different platforms and how effective one platform might be against another. So if you have content that’s not necessarily being shared one place or getting a lot of comments on another platform, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the content isn’t working. It just means that it’s working differently for that platform.

And this really kind of gave us an introspection as to if our social strategy is addressing our real world challenges. You know, what is it that we really needed to improve upon in our social strategy? Whether that’s helping the call center go down in its call volume, whether it’s leading a certain percentage of visitors to , or whether it’s getting more interaction online.

And we really put that into our content strategy and how we would engage our audiences on multiple platforms.

And that leads us right into our content optimization. So in this slide, you can see that we have five different buckets for our five different content buckets where our audiences are kind of divided into. And this has been really helpful for us, specifically since we started focusing on customer segmentation in our social media around 2013. It was a very helpful experience for us in our paid media especially that we’re still utilizing and still using today.

But as you can see in the customer targeting section on the page, it really helps us identify the different types of people that we want to engage with and how they may interact with the information that we’re providing. Matching the content types to our segments through the content tags i.e. the five buckets helps us to establish a relationship between our content types and our audiences and where these specific audiences like to be on social media.

So for instance, let’s take parents. The parents like aware and prepare, which is the first content bucket, and applying for aid. And then we also have parent borrowers who are interested in repayment and loan resolution. So we know for the demographic of parent, there are more parents on Facebook than there are on Twitter. So we like to focus some of our content that’s specifically designed to parents to Facebook more so than to Twitter because we know that it’ll travel a lot faster and maybe further on that platform than another.

Same thing for YouTube as well.

So understanding our key audience through targeted demographics has helped us significantly in the way that we build our content and the way that that content travels.

Moving onto slide nine, this is about developing and using a knowledge base. This has really helped us in a significant way in our content development because it immediately gives the person working on developing the content access to an in-depth understanding of the content that they’re producing.

Meaning that a lot of our creatives who might build the infographics for us, who might build our flyers for us, or, you know, and sometimes even our memes, they might not necessarily be subject matter experts. But having this knowledge base allows them to have answers to the general question we’re trying to address in the content and allow them to base their work from that.

Integrated campaigns have been something that’s really helped us in the past two years where we’ve been able to pull people together in different business units that might not necessarily often work together to make our campaign stronger.

So how does that apply to you? Well, I’m not sure how big of a school you are, university you are with, but let’s take this for example in terms of integrated campaign -- if you were able to speak to the art director or the art professor and ask if there were any students that’d be willing to do an internship or some work on the side in developing content, graphic content for you all for your social media or for your webpages. You can immediately share, you know, if you work that out and if that was actually possible, you could share this knowledge base with that person, that artist, so that they can do the work and it takes a lot of the proofreading and editing out of the work load because they have access to that information.

I would still implore you all to definitely, you know, follow up behind the artist. That’s something that we still have to do pretty heavily ourselves because sometimes, you know, an artist, even as creative as they are, our business is complicated. So we have to kind of help them through it in some instances.

But that is just an example of a way where knowledge base is really important -- not only for you and not only for the consistency of the content, because you know whether you stay there forever or there’s a lot of turnover, having the knowledge base helps you to develop a consistent tone of voice. And that’s something that we’re going to talk about just a little but later. But a knowledge base has been very helpful to us.

So we’ve spent a lot of time trying to stay a step ahead of our audience and know what their interests are. And while signs and sentiments like, you know, a bunch of likes or shares or comments and compliments on your post can be encouraging, they don’t fully help us understand what’s working and what isn’t.

So we have to take a really good look, a deep dive into our data so that we can make decisions beaus the truth of the matter is the longer we’ve been in the business of digital engagement for federal student aid, the more we’ve realized that there is not as much guesswork there anymore. And data isn’t just there to help you measure success, but it’s there to help you strategize.

Let me give you an example here. This is a, not a diagram but it’s kind of like an image where you can see our most visited web pages. And this really informs us of we know that our business is cyclical and that we can anticipate certain questions being on top of mind at certain points of the year more so than others.

But this also gives us a more in depth look at where people are going on our page, how long they’re staying, and how much they’ve engaged, you know, with that page -- how many buttons they’ve clicked. How many unique visitors we get to that page versus recurring visitors to help us understand what is it that this new crop of freshmen or these graduating high school seniors need to know that they don’t. And how can we position that information into content that they’ll accept?

You know, whether it’s hitting on a pop culture note at the time, having data like this really helps you expand your content and hit your audience - hit the sweet spot of the information that they want to know.

So hopefully, you know, this information is readily available to you either through Google Analytics or whatever your IT services uses to track page counts or page views.

So that leads us into developing better content. And I know that’s kind of presumptuous because I don’t know how good your content is, but we’re just going to roll with the punches and we’re just going to say that call content can be better, to some extent, and here are some tips that might be able to help you through that.

So content choreography is a really cool term to kind of, you know, define an issue that we actually ran into where our content actually became like really engaging and people responded to it and it was really nice. It had a fresh design. It looked really awesome.

And then they would go to our web page. And our web page had a lot of text and it really wasn’t engaging. And we really had to take a look at that and, you know, web has completely changed the way that - I’m sorry. Social media has changed the way that people look at their web experiences.

Really it’s kind of like I feel like people expect if your content on your social media looks really cool and it’s really engaging, but they get to your site and they’re underwhelmed, you might just lose an engagement point there with somebody coming back and visiting the page because like we said in our baseline, our content baseline is really there to help us simplify and help us get people to self-help and go back to our website. And if we’re not doing that, we’re missing the mark.

So it’s crucial that your creative is both well-designed and seamless from beginning to end -- not just on your social media properties or across your social media properties, but also on your website as well.

Creating a smooth and cohesive visual experience for users is almost if not equally as important as the messaging of the content itself. If you think about it, if a user sees a well-designed, aesthetically pleasing infographic and then clicks to your awful looking landing page, it’s going to be a major turnoff, potentially result if your word of mouth of that person in the content and what they share being turned down in a sense.

So how do you make your content more shareable? You have to build bold visuals with a unified vision for design. And bold visuals doesn’t mean that it needs to be fancy, bright colors. Not at all. It could be however your brand personality is. The most important factor is that it needs to be strong and have a (unintelligible) call to action. Because social media doesn’t directly affect your SEO but the more your audience shares your content, and that leads people back to your website, the higher your website will rank in the search. So it does have an effect.

But I did throw out a term in there -- brand personality. And as you can see on your screen now, there’s a little diagram. I’m sorry it’s so small. I tried to blow it up but this was as big as I could get it and fit all of the information on there for you. But essentially there’s a - how many here? Two, four six, eight, ten different quote unquote brand types or brand archetypes. And that shows you to the left where it goes from joker to seductress to friend to hero to wise to king to mother, friend, mother, maiden and dreamer.

And if you look to the right, it associates brands with these archetypes. So Virgin I would think the airplane would have a - if you look at their marketing, they really do take on a joker type of personality.

BMW -- the ultimate driving machine. They seduce you with their brand personality. Harley Davidson -- they’re rebels. Let’s see. Google is wise because you can get every answer to your question from Google. Apple -- dreamer. Disney is the maiden. They use the term maiden in the sense of being innocent and kind.

So these are, you know, interesting things that I think you might want to delve into because it’s important. Every brand has its own tone of voice. Every platform, for that matter, has its own culture, has its own speed. Twitter is much faster than Facebook, Facebook conversations -- especially with today’s political climate. It seems like conversations could go on forever. People write dissertations in the comments. And Twitter, it’s much faster and just has a completely different feel.

Well, each brand has a different tone. Our style guides and how we write and how relaxed we want to be with our posts and funny we want to be with our posts or serious and be a trusted source. We had to learn lessons the hard way it this process. It hasn’t always been easy to try to find our tone of voice where this sometimes, you know, there was one time where we tried to be funny and it was too funny that it was offensive. And we didn’t mean to do that. We were just trying to get a point across. And while some people got it, others didn’t. That was a hard mistake that we had to learn, but that we did learn and we carried into the future and we currently implement.

So our brand tone, if you look at our responses to our customers sometimes, we can be playful. We can be fun. But we’ve had to learn to tone it down and dial it back a bit because there’s no place more dangerous to miss your message than on social media. And if you hit, you know, the wrong note with somebody, you might turn them off forever.

So you have to help your audience identify with your brand on a more personal level. Every platform is going to be different and your tone can vary slightly, but you want to make sure that you’re consistent across all channels.

So being a quote unquote so-called government creative, I am very acutely aware that constantly generating new and relevant content or graphics while tailoring your posts for your reader across multiple platforms can be extremely time consuming -- you know, almost a full time job within itself.

I’m fully aware of that and I totally get it. One of the things that we’ve done -- and this goes back to the data point -- is analyzing the content that we have used to see, you know, what was really engaging or what hit that note that everybody liked where it was shared pretty constantly or it got a lot of likes or comments. And taking those and repurposing them or even reusing them, maybe like a few months later, maybe next year later.

But keep what you know works well. And in our quick plug to the financial aid toolkit dot ed dot gov, we try to quarterly put content that we know has worked very well for us on that website for you so that you can take those same posts that we had and you can use them, too. There’s no need or no worry for plagiarism. We’re not concerned with that.

We’re giving it to you because we want you to use it because we know it works. And we really care about our mission. So please feel free. I’m going to say it one more time. If you didn’t know before, now you know -- financialaidtoolkit..

So in repurposing your content, you can do that in a couple of different ways. You can take on your customer’s point of view because most of the time, you know, our content will come from us as the trusted source. But sometimes we don’t always take out customer’s point of view while we’re actually making the post. So you can do that.

Or you can reimage the creative to engage someone who would’ve never considered your product in the first place -- which ironically probably would’ve been me when I was in college. You know, getting those second year and those third year college or university students to focus on things like this, like financial aid, it gets a little harder because they’re so busy trying to have fun.

That goes to say that, you know, repurposing your content - well let me not too far ahead of myself, because that’s going to come up in the next slide. But on this slide, this is a really cool example of six different points of views from one blog post. So we do blog posts pretty frequently here. And sometimes, some do really well and some fall flat -- well flatter than, you know, we’d really like them to be.

But if we take the time to kind of mix up how we distribute or how we push out the blog posts or how we market the blog post, we get different results. Like let’s say you do a blog post and it’s been up for a while. Maybe, you know, the next day you just want to take the headline -- specifically the title and the subtitle -- and post that with a link to the blog. Or you might want to take a quotable.

These are all like news tricks, like news agencies do this a lot on social media where they’ll take a quote, you know, a standalone sound bite that conveys a thought that might be intriguing to a member of your audience that they might want to grab or might want to use in conversation in an argument with someone else or as a tidbit and FYI to share with a friend with a link to the blog post.

Statistics and data points, tips that are actionable, even something that’s really cool that happens on Reddit sometimes is like people will take the pithy, share worthy comments or the little jabs or digs, a comment that someone left in there that’s not too offensive but kind of funny that we didn’t think about and kind of use that as a tease to the blog. And you can kind of add that person to give them a little shine for helping out.

Or, you know, even presenting images, charts, and non-text content is really helpful in kind of reinventing interest in that blog. And you might do this. You don’t have to use all six, but you might do this. If you do this method, you can push that blog out every day for a full week in a different way and that might help the traction and show an increase in your page views to the blog.

Something that’s really important is being able to pivot the conversation -- being able to take how the conversation originally happened and turn it into something else. Like life moments, as I was talking about before -- the second to third year students, it might be really hard to market the message to them. But if you take the life event of say there are really two types of college or university students, right? Those that live in a dormitory and those that don’t. And that transition from leaving the dormitory to getting your own place while in college, that’s a major life event for a college student.

And you like tailor a message to that event, to that unique event, is really it could be very strong and something that they would consider.

Or you could have a testimonial from someone who has been in your office, a brand evangelist. That’s another way to share their message, help them share their message about your customer service or, you know, whatever applications that are available to them that others might not know in their specific circle.

But there is a whole list here. I’m not going to go through all of them. But very engaging tips on how to pivot the conversation to extend the conversation.

Something that we experimented with last year -- well actually the past two years -- was how to take advantage of video. Video has been growing significantly online with Periscope, with Meerkat, with Facebook Live. We know that the audience really wants to see a very real time situation and a real time engagement.

And we try to kind of utilize that in our own way by taking questions that are frequently asked of us on social media and having a real life person, representative, you know, an FAA or a counselor or even somebody who works with federal student aid answer the question in under a minute and a half and lead them to a link at the end which would take them to more information on the website.

We experimented with this because we realized in exploring our data and going back to data driven decisions that we needed to - people liked our videos, but they weren’t watching our videos all the way through. And that was a major problem. Those maybe 5% were getting all the way to the very end. But our videos, as educational as they are, tend to be kind of long. Let’s say they average around two minutes, two minutes and thirty seconds. And the drop off was significant.

So we wanted to kind of share the same information or where they could go for more information in a smaller amount of time so that they could engage with it in a stronger way. And we did that by giving it a name. It was called the Q series. It went from ask federal student aid to the Q series. And, you know, we set a time and day of the week that it would go live. And we would let our followers know. And then we watched to see what would happen.

The engagement levels really weren’t as strong as we wanted them to be. And that goes, you know, for making our content better, being able to experiment on specific channels. This experiment took place for us on YouTube. And we invested time and money into doing this experiment so that we could make our content as great as it could be. But we realized that that really wasn’t an avenue that people wanted to hear from us or in the way that they wanted to hear from us.

So we’re going back to the drawing board and the idea isn’t dead, but the point is that trying to find a way to convey your message or engage your audience through video -- it might take you a couple of times to get it right, to see what it is that your audience really likes from you through video -- but definitely take some time and experiment there because the global social media audience is using it and consuming it at great paces.

Interactive content like quizzes, polls, calculators, and brackets are also very popular online. Something that I’ve been interested in for a while. And I have a list of free online tools that can help you create some of these items because again, it’s the reinvention of the content that you have, right?

So, you know, instead of having, you know, a flyer saying, you know, the FAFSA season is almost ready, you know, to begin, you can do a quiz and people can see, you know, what types of aid that’s available to them or what they’re eligible for.

So I want to kind of give you a little overview of some of what’s available online -- of the free resources that are online that can really help you. And I hope you all take some time, in trying to make your content better, explore some of these options because I know, you know, when I’ve talked to people about this before, they have been very not necessarily apprehensive.

But you know, I know that everybody doesn’t have a graphic artist there, you know, on staff and that it’s not - I know it’s something that generally takes money and time. But these are free resources that I’ve tried myself that I know are relatively easy to use.

The first one is Apester. Let’s just go with that pronunciation. I’m not exactly sure if that’s right. But it’s a free resource that specifically deals with storytelling platforms. It creates quizzes and polls. It’s really awesome, I believe the New York Daily News has used it. And their use of it, it actually was one of the most popular social media posts that they’ve ever had. And it was a simple quiz.

This would be great engagement for, you know, seniors who are going out and need to know about loan repayment or freshman coming in that need to know, you know, what they’re eligible for. But this really is a new way for you to be able to create this content, embed it on your web page, or even send it out on your social media posts.

Designfeed.io -- now, this has a caveat, okay? This is free for now. It’s in beta. I had a friend of mine use it and they asked me if I had heard of it. I hadn’t. I signed up and I kid you not, I tried it one time and I fell in love. It’s a really great way to create highly visual, high quality content to fit all of your platforms.

So, you know, that’s another thing -- you know, Twitter and Facebook have their own sizing optimizations for content and resizing photos and flyers can get complicated and can take a lot of time. This application actually does it for you. It sizes the content that you create on this website to fit the specific content parameters for each platform you assign to deliver it to, which is really awesome.

So it’s free right now because it’s in beta, which means it’s still in testing. But it works well. Doesn’t have a lot of bugs. I’m not sure if it’s going to be free forever. I do feel like it’ll be similar to another application that I’m about to show you next called Canva, where it’s free but there are opt-in or purchase products available or upgrades available if you feel like spending the money.

That being said, Canva is another tool that understands that one size doesn’t fit all. They are able to - there’s a literal magic resize button on the platform so that if you upload a photo or flyer or anything like that, an infographic, it will resize it for you so that it can fit all the different platforms that you want to distribute it to.

And that’s a really great tool that makes your job easier and make the content development process a lot faster. Again, this is a free resource.

So now we’re getting closer to the end. We’re going to talk about platform updates. These are something that caught my eye that will be interesting to keep your eye on as they become more adapted by the user base.

So I saw this article in Tech Crunch this past April and it was talking about instant articles and what it really is, what it’s going to do, and how it could possibly change the game looking down the road three years from now.

Well, a lot of people -- us included -- we’re writing blogs and our blogs are really great for posting one off pieces of content. And it’s really awesome. But a lot of our conversations to blog posts, people take blog posts, post them on social media and then they have the conversations about the blog post in the social media platform -- not necessarily in the comments section. And that’s something that’s a trend that has been happening for the past few years now and it keeps growing.

Facebook acknowledged that and said well, how can we fix that? Let’s create instant articles where people can essentially build their blogs -- the same content that you would put on your blog, you put it in an instant article and that way the conversation can stay within the platform instead of somebody going outside of the platform to your website to have the conversation.

That’s great for Facebook -- not necessarily great for your brand if your objective is user views to your web page. But the benefit also is that your community can grow because people will be able to share instant articles a lot easier. And as you can see, some of the metrics on here gets 20% more clicks, 70% less likely to abandon, a blog and a website to go back to the platform, and 30% more shares than general blog posts so far in their research.

So this is something that’s really intriguing. As you look down and you look at your strategy over the next year or two, think about incorporating instant articles into your content strategy because this could be, you know, at least just as effective as your blog post, if not more.

Another development is Facebook Bots. The bot engine enables ongoing training of bots using sample conversations -- meaning that if somebody goes to Facebook Messenger and they want to have a dialog or ask a question similar to how people ask on Twitter, you can literally train the artificial intelligence or the AI within this bot for Messenger to answer questions based on key words that are asked in the questions.

So if someone mentions Pell Grant and the word apply and there’s a question mark, it does a mathematical algorithm and continues to search for more key words to be able to pull from the knowledge base that I mentioned earlier the knowledge base that you would import into the Facebook bots back in to answer the question properly.

And I know it sounds a little complicated, a little nerdy, but it’s something that a lot of Fortune 500 companies are getting into and using for their customer service that is already being very helpful for them. And I think it’s going to be adapted to a wider base in the near future.

So this enables us to create conversations that the bot can automatically chat with users. And the bot engine effectively turns natural language into structured data as a simple way to manage context and drive conversations based on the business apps or goals.

So, you know, if the goal is to drive them to not only answer their question but to drive them to the specific web page where the answer is, that’s a win-win because it saves a person from calling the help desk or staying on hold for, you know, an unknown amount of time, and gets their questions addressed pretty quickly and gets them to the exact place where they need to go.

So this is something that I would, if I were you, I would explore as a way to help you from having to answer - and it might be something where you enjoy just helping students, answering their questions on social media. But if you need the time back, this is something that’s very helpful -- something that you can even market to your students to help them get the information that they need.

Next is Twitter emoji targeting. This is fairly new and it’s genius. I kind of wonder why it took them so long to even think of this. But if you are in a position where you’re working for a university or a college that has a paid media element to their social media strategy and you’re able to do that, Twitter emoji targeting is really awesome.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but during the NCAA Twitter debuted specific emojis for teams for the NCAA tournament, March Madness. That transferred to Game of Thrones to the Emmys to the Oscars and as of recently, the RNC. So it’s you know these customized emojis are becoming more and more prevalent and Twitter has taken notice that just like you can target someone’s hash tags or key words that they use, you can also target emojis.

Because, you know, as we know with this new generation of Twitter users, you can actually communicate a lot through emojis. So it makes all the sense in the world to actually target through them. So that might be something if you have the ability that you might want to explore in the future.

Honorable mentions are Facebook 360. To me, it’s kind of a struggle. Like I actually earlier this year pitched our federal student aid using Instagram. Unfortunately, our business isn’t what I’d consider to be very visual. So we don’t have an Instagram account as of yet. But Department of Education does and they’re finding ways to communicate messages through that platform. And I’m sure that we haven’t given up on Instagram. We’re just waiting for the right time and the right place and the right idea to promote through there.

Well, Facebook 360 is similar to YouTube 360 where you’re able to use the camera on your phone and you’re able to take a panoramic view, a full 360-degree view, of wherever you are and record that. And you can speak during this recording. And someone can then - Facebook maps out your 360-degree map of the video that you took and someone on the other side -- the user perspective -- can actually move their phone - this is really hard to explain.

They can actually move their phone anywhere in the 360-degree sphere to what you recorded and see what you saw, which is really kind of cool. Not exactly sure how we’ll be able to use it just yet, but if you have any ideas please feel free to hit me up. I love ideas. I love innovation. I love creative thoughts. I’m thinking about it, so if you have an idea, please shoot me a line. My contact information will be at the end of this presentation.

Another honorable mention is Snapchat’s new discover function. My niece was just in town last week and she was showing me how she uses it and it’s actually quite awesome. Where brands are on there, they can do 60-second videos and present any information that they want or point that they want to get across. They can also put articles on there for their audience to read, which is something that hopefully we’ll be exploring in the coming months of how we might be able to take advantage of that.

So as we’re nearing the close, I just want to give kind of a recap of, you know, some challenges that we might have versus some opportunities. The content baselines -- you know, provide plain language content that anticipates customer’s needs and encourages them to self-serve.

Content is king; distribution is queen -- how your content is working towards your goals, Data driven decisions. Content choreography. The opportunities of content development integration -- that’s. you know, when I was talking about maybe using somebody from the art team to help you develop your content.

New networks of communication channels that you don’t necessarily have to just, you know, drop in. You might want to reserve your name on a new platform and just make sure somebody doesn’t take that or tries to operate as you on those channels. But you don’t necessarily have to just jump in. And that platform might not be the best thing for your message or the best avenue for your message to be distributed.

Pivoting your message -- totally critical. Being able to take pop culture, life events, holidays and kind of, you know, merging that or morphing that into your message that it becomes immediately relevant to at least a section of your audience.

And better tools -- there are a lot of tools out there that are free. And definitely, you know, explore them. See what’s out there, what’s available, what some of your peers are using and learn from that.

And with that being said, that concludes it with seven minutes to spare. If you have any questions, I’m going to see if I can answer any. But again this has been effective tips for using digital engagement. My name is Jared Anderson. My email is Jared.Anderson@. So I will see if there are any questions, and if there aren’t in the queue, we can just wait just a few moments and see if any pop up. If not, I hope you all had a really great experience with this webinar and that you might’ve found it helpful. I hope that we marketed it in the right way so that it was what you expected it to be. And if not, we apologize. But hopefully you enjoyed it and I look forward to doing this again with you all sometime soon. Thanks a lot.

James Copeland: We just want to remind our listeners -- this is James Copeland -- just want to remind our listeners that if you have any questions on the platform, if you look where it says Q&A you can type your questions in there and we’ll be more than happy to answer the questions. That’s been available to you since the beginning of the presentation.

I think Mr. Anderson did a fine job in explaining how content and social media are better digital social media is arranged so you can reach your audience in a meaningful way but making sure that the content as well as the information that’s being dispensed matches somehow -- and more importantly, that it’s able to capture their imagination. And once you capture their imagination, then you can start to give them more informative information. So that’s very important to have those two link up so that the information is more meaningful not just to those who are putting it out there, but those who are receiving it.

As I’ve always said, it’s not always what the transmitter transmits; it’s what the receiver perceives. So it’s very important to have information and content that is available but more importantly easy to understand and relatable.

So please if you have any questions, please feel free to type those in and we’ll be more than happy to address those before this webinar is complete.

Jared, so from everything that’s been explained, this is for basically a novice with some of the information that you left on about the different websites that are available that they can go out and take advantage of those to help them help their constituents or customer base understand how their information will be more helpful to them.

So that was the whole basis of this. So you don’t have to be an expert to do this. Am I right by saying it?

Jared Anderson: Yes. Absolutely. I wanted to make sure that, like I said before at the beginning, I wasn’t sure where everybody’s baseline was. I know that there are some people who are just beginning, some people who are limited in their resources, whereas others who have, you know, maybe even large teams and a big budget.

But I wanted to be able to provide some information that could be helpful no matter where you were in that spectrum. So again I apologize if it was too remedial or if it was too advanced. I think these are base concepts that most people can relate to and understand and utilize.

So the storytelling app, I got two questions that I saw pop up on the Q&A section. The storytelling app, Apester I believe is the pronunciation. It really helps you not necessarily tell a story, but it helps you put your content in a different format -- whether that’s through a quiz or through questions and answers so that you can kind of guide them along to a specific thought i.e. in using the quiz, you can set it up.

If a person needs to know -- let’s see? What’s a great example? Okay. If a person wanted to know if they were Pell eligible, they would have an answer of 51% going one way in the multiple choice questions, or if they needed work study grants, it would be 51% on the other spectrum of the questions. So you would have multiple answer questions -- at least two -- that would lead you down a path where you’re either going to come to the answer of one or the other, and/or both. You can have a third where it leads you to both.

So it’s not necessarily storytelling. It’s about presenting your information in a different way that some people call storytelling.

James Copeland: So am I to take that, Jared, it’s sort of like building understanding through the content but as they answer or receive the information, you’re building their understanding so it enhances their learning experience.

Jared Anderson: Absolutely.

James Copeland: Okay.

Jared Anderson: Absolutely. And that’s something that we really haven’t done that we’re looking to - that’s just one thing that we’re looking to in the future. And that’s why I wanted you to be aware. Not exactly sure how successful it will be. I think it will be. But I want to put you all on the front edge of what we’re doing, on the leading edge of what we’re doing. So that’s something that you might see from us in the near future.

James Copeland: We also want to mention they can watch the webinar again later. You want to make mention of that?

Jared Anderson: Yes, sure. I mentioned it before. The financial aid toolkit dot ed dot gov -- you can find it under I believe is it presentations where it will be listed?

James Copeland: Yes.

Jared Anderson: And you search for effective tips for using digital engagement and it should pop up. You might just have to scroll a little bit, but because this is the latest one, it should be fresh. It should be near the top.

I am told that it will be available in two weeks, so please look for it then.

James Copeland: And we want to remind our listeners that as with this presentation that you’re receiving today, you can also find a plethora of other information that is available through the FSA toolkit. These resources are available for your viewing and listening so that you can spread the word through your constituents and colleagues as well.

So we have trainings on a variety of different topics. So please, feel free to go out and look at our FSA toolkit and retrieve this information that you’ve heard today. This information will be available in approximately two weeks but there’s also other information on the toolkit. You’ll find information on the new release of the 2017-18 FAFSA. You’ll also find information on the FSAID. You can also find information on the FAFSA demo site. And there’s other information that you’ll find available as well.

Keep in mind that we have this information available in English and in Spanish. And just be aware that you can also receive and put in orders for our publications. These publications are mailed to you at no charge.

So please, take advantage of all these helpful publications and resources that federal student aid has available to assist you in assisting others and pursuing their post-secondary dreams.

I just want to thank Mr. Jared Anderson again and thank our listeners for joining us this afternoon to receive this important information. Keep in mind again -- this is digital engagement. It’s effective tips for using digital engagement hosted by the US Department of Education Office of Federal Student Aid.

Our presenter today was Mr. Jared Anderson. And thank you all and have a pleasant evening.

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