2020 has proven itself as a year unlike any other.
Every aspect of life and work in higher education has evolved at a speed that can only be described as seismic — this includes the ways that we, the CU Boulder College of Engineering Communications Team use, understand and execute on our @CUEngineering social media channels. In my role directly managing our channels, I’ve learned so much about the platforms themselves and most notably about the audience that reads and interprets what’s being posted every day.
One of the strategic measures we’ve implemented is “social silence.” Social silence is not the same as going dark. Rather, it means we push pause on social content that does not address current events or relevant information that’s critical to the topics the audience is talking about.
There is no timeline or expectation for how long this silence lasts; it can be one hour or one month. Enacting social media silence is a big deal for us, but rest assured while our timeline may have paused normal posting frequency, we’re still very much listening to what the audience is saying about these important and top-of-mind issues.
I wrote an in-depth blog on Sprout Social with details about our thought process, implementation, justification and what the sentiment data told us to further explain the inner workings of social silence.
Social media silence: How to know when your brand should be quiet
If you have feedback, an idea, a content submission or just want to say hi, reach out to me either on Twitter or at Austin.Braun-1@Colorado.edu