university writing centers

social media strategy proposal

Ross Bradley and Maegan Hendricks

Organization Description
Overview:
What is the organizations mission?
The University Writing Center (UWC) was founded at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR)
to help students and community members who want help with their writing at any stage of the
process
What are the main products, services, or activities?
The UWC at UALR provides face to face conference sessions and online conference sessions via the
online writing lab or OWL (o
wl.ualr@gmail.com
). The UWC provides these specific services:
Quality feedback about your writing
Problem-solving strategies
Assistance with academic technology
How big is the organization?
The UWC at UALR employees twenty to twenty five interns a semester, six paid graduate assistants,
and one full time director. Looking at data from previous semesters, the UWC has around 1200 visits
from university students and community members and between 300 and 500 conferences a
semester
How long has it been around?
The UWC at UALR was founded in 1981.
Does it have a social media presence? If so, describe.
The UWC create Facebook in August 2012. Facebook is the only social media platform the UWC
uses. The UWC posts a few times a month to their Facebook account. The posts are usually more
fun things like funny memes related to writing or links.

Branding strategy:
Has this organization established a brand? If so, how would you describe it?

The UWC has an established brand and is consistent as far as posting so far.
What creates the brand personality?
The past administrators of the UWC Facebook page were very consistent as far as what they posted.
Looking back on the Facebook posts, they mostly consistent of academic memes related to writing
or a writing center.
What emotions does this brand inspire?
The brand is very lighthearted and fun, but also academic. The UWC comes across as a fun
environment where you can get help with your writing.
What does this brand promise to its customers, clients, volunteers, community members,
stakeholders, etc.?
The brand promises to provide a
welcoming and communal environment in which the UALR
community can improve writing skills and techniques in a comfortable, community-oriented
environment. Compared to other writing centers facebook about pages, the UWCs has a lot more
information that is useful to potential clients.
How does this brand stand out from its competitors?
Just looking at the Facebook pages of other writing centers, the UWC at UALR seems much more
fun just because of all the meme posts. On the bad side, the UWC at UALR doesnt a lot at all, which
makes it seem like it isnt very active.
If the organization does not have a brand, how do you think it should brand itself? What
should the brand message be, and why? How might the organization begin establishing this
brand?
The UWC at UALR does have an established brand, we just need to create a consistent posting
schedule and actually post things. The page does have 300 likes, which is impressive considering
there is only a one post every few weeks. I think sticking to the academic memes and making that a
part of the branding sets the UWC at UALR apart from the other writing center and is also useful in
connecting to our audience.

Targeting recommendations

Personas:
Stephen Jared
Full time student
Advertising Major

About
Stephen worked as a manager for a
local advertising firm for 24 years.
The firm started going under in the
the late 2000s and was bought by a
larger firm in 2014. He was laid off
after the buyout.

Stephen managed the print ad side of the business specifically local newspaper and magazines ads.
Of course, this side of advertising saw the most decline with the introduction and widespread use of
the Internet. He started going to college right after high school at a local 2 year college, but when he
was promoted at his part time job he quit. He has decided to go back to college to receive an
undergraduate degree in advertising and reenter the workforce.

Demographics
51
Male
Full time student currently
He was making 53,000 as a print advertising manager.
Maumelle, Arkansas
Highschool diploma
Never completed his associate's degree, but had 40 credit hours transfer when he
started working on his undergraduate.
Married with two kids
His wife Lesley is a middle school teacher
His first son, John, is 17 and is a highschool junior

 His second son, Timothy is 12 and is in the seventh grade

Goals
Stephen wants to complete his degree and return to the workforce as soon as possible.

Challenges
He has been out of college for a while and needs help with things like new technology and
writing papers the way his professors want him to.
He is taking composition one this semester and has no idea what he is doing and he has to
turn in a research paper in three weeks.
His teacher told him to go to the University Writing Center and the interns there would be
able to help him outside of class.

Values
Family
Work ethic

Fears
He doesnt have any extra money to pay for tutoring
He is scared of technology and knows he needs help with it

How we can help

The University Writing Center can help students with any writing assignment or any part of
the writing process
The University Writing Center is free to all university students
The interns at the writing center will also help with technology issues like navigating word
or google docs.

Marketing Message
The University Writing Center is a free university service that can help you with all your college
writing.
Elevator Pitch:

Come to the University Writing Center to get help with your writing. The interns in the writing center
can help you with all parts of the writing process to brainstorming and outlining to paragraph
organization and thesis statements. We can even help you with technology issues.

Callie Roma
Full time student
Undeclared Major

About
Callie is entering college as a
freshman straight from high school. In
high school, she had good grades and
was involved in student government
as well as played soccer, which
helped her earn a scholarship for college.
Callie just turned 18 and has enrolled in a variety of classes to satisfy the states core curriculum
requirements. For her electives she is taking World Literature and Chemistry, putting her at 15 hours
her first semester. She wanted to take an art course but it would have interfered with soccer
practice and games so she will have to wait until next semester. She got a weekend job at an ice
cream parlor that is willing to work with her class and practice/game schedule.

Demographics
18
Female
Full time student
Cabot, Arkansas
Highschool diploma
Oldest of two children,
brother named Cameron is three years younger
Very active on Twitter, SnapChat, Tumblr, and Facebook

Goals
To do well in her classes

 Balance her busy schedule

Decide what she wants to major in

Challenges
Very busy and practice requires her to do her homework and study at odd times.
She is taking Composition I and is struggling with finding a topic for a research paper and
doesnt understand MLA formatting or citations.
Callies teacher took her class to the University Writing Center for a tour, but Callie doesnt
know if they can help her because she doesnt know where to start on her assignment.

Values
Fairness
Good work ethics

Fears
Know one will be able to help her or when she asks for it
Seeming stupid if she asks for help
Failure

How we can help

The University Writing Center can help students with any writing assignment or any part of
the writing process
The University Writing Center is free to all university students and open in the
afternoons/evenings.
The interns at the writing center have a great grasp on MLA and citations as well as tons of
free material and tools to provide students with.

Marketing Message
The University Writing Center is a free university service that can help you with all your college
writing.
Elevator Pitch:
Come to the University Writing Center to get help with your writing. We can help you at any point in
the writing process, be it: brainstorming and outlining, paragraph structure and organization, or
working on thesis statements. We can also help with any citation and formatting needs.

Audience
:

Describe the types of audiences this organization should try to reach through social media.
What are their demographics? What are their interests?
The UWC should be striving to connect with and reach all of UALRs students. We are focusing on
UALRs core demographic taken from U
ALR's Chancellor's Address
which finds that the majority of
students on campus are ages 27-28, so we wanted to say that our age group is from 18-55. As
students attending the university, everybody has the common interest in doing well in their classes
so they can graduate and earn a degree.

Why are the audiences you described important for this organization? How do you know?
Using past experiences with the UWC and going over clients we work with, Callie and Stephen are
clients that our interns worked with the most. They have questions and issues that many students
have when they come to us for help, and the same reservations that the UWC encounters with
clients every day.
Which social media platforms do you recommend for reaching these audiences, and why?
We choose to use Facebook and Twitter as the UWCs way of reaching their student audience.
Facebook is the most used social media platform for all ages, with 64% of users aging from 50 to
older.
Twitter tends to be for a younger age group and is not as popular as Facebook but is still a top
social media platform competitor (D
uggan
).

Content strategies:
What types of content will be most useful to these audiences? How will it satisfy a need for
them?
When we started to look at other writing centers social media sites to gauge how we wanted our
own, we saw a lot of interesting things happening. One thing we wanted to adopt from them is
leveraging interns social media interactions to give the UWC more presence online. Using this
technique, we also wanted to post sports activities and campus life events that will show our school
spirit and make us more approachable.
One new content idea we included is doing birthday bios for our interns so that people following us
can get to know the interns and be more comfortable with them.
What types of content will be most engaging to these audiences? What will they enjoy, find
entertaining, and want to interact with?

Using what we learned from other university writing centers in the first assignment, we knew that
memes that were related to writing or college were great at engaging with our audience and past
Facebook posts from the UWC at UALR also showed memes to be effective at engaging with our
audience.
Also, interactive posts like quizzes seemed to also be engaging and effective. One of the posts with
the most reach for the UWC at UALR, was a Harry Potter quiz. We decided to post quizzes we found
that were relevant to our audience and the UWC to engage with our audience.
What types of content best exemplify the values and message of the brand?
We tried to keep our content at a good 80/20 ratio of fun campus and student related post to posts
that focus on coming into the writing center and getting assistance. We used useful infographics to
tell what the writing center does as well as videos and articles related to writing issues and
grammar. Sometimes we were able to make our content fun, which we predict to do well.
If you have audiences with different interests, how can you balance their diverse content
needs?
UALR has mix between older working students and younger more traditional aged college students.
We tried to balance our content as far as the two age groups. We tried our best to mix up our
references in our memes, so that both audiences would get and engage with it. We also mixed
helpful tips and articles for traditional college aged students with helpful reminders for older
students like reminders about senior citizen registration.

Calendar & Content

Editorial Calendar:
To decide how much content to post, we referred to Kevan Lees article Infographic: How Often
Should You Post on Social Media? See the Most Popular Research and Tips. In this article, research
shows two Facebook posts and three Twitter posts per day are optimal and any more posts per day
than that will cause engagement to drop off (Lee).
We also research the best time to post to Facebook and Twitter. For Twitter, Samatha Murphy Kelly
recommends posting between two and four pm on the weekdays and not after nine pm in the
article The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook, Twitter (Kelly). We did not create any
Twitter posts after nine. We tried our best to keep a Twitter post per week day between two and

four pm, but some of our posts were earlier in the day. We did this because students would be more
active earlier in the day because of classes.
In the same article by Kelly, she recommends posting around 11 am to get the most traffic and not
posting after 4 pm (Kelly). She has also found that weekend posts dont get as much traction as
weekday posts (Kelly). Because of this, we limited our weekend Facebook posts and posted around
11 am during the week. We also decided not to post a lot on weekends because students are more
active on college related accounts during the week and not the weekends. We still posted, but we
did not follow our two Facebook and three Twitter posts a day. Because of this, we extended our
two weeks of content to include 14 business days with a few weekends of content on top of that.
The most important thing we learned from the first project was leveraging other peoples social
media traffic to boost your own. We did this by connecting to other UALR organizations through
tags and using our own interns social media accounts via Facebook and Twitter posts. Birthday
posts are always a hit and get a lot of visibility so with this knowledge, we decided to create a post
and tag them so to gain some of their account traffic for our own.
We also saw that the Texas A&M University Writing Center did similar intern posts and that was their
most liked type of post. We also tried our best to post about writing or college life because it
advanced our brand message. Our social media is to reach 1,000 page likes on our Facebook
account and start a Twitter and reach 500 Twitter followers.

Our full calendar can be found here: S

ocial Media Calendar.
Just go to the month of August for a
closer look.

Content
:

Detailed posts with images, infographics, videos, etc. can be found in the content folder along with
the agenda.

6/27/2016

Teamweek

Campus Map post

Facebook Post

10:00 am - 10:30 am

Getting to know your new campus

Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Introduction to University Writing Ce...

Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Social Media Group Meeting

Social Media Group Meeting
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Fandom Friday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

Sat 6 Aug
Cursive Writing Quiz
Both Facebook and Twitter

10:00 am - 10:30 am

Sun 7 Aug
Last week before classes
Both Facebook and Twitter

10:00 am - 10:30 am

8 - 14 Aug

Students start coming

back this week

Mon 8 Aug
Start Content

Reminder Post about being closed

Both Facebook and Twitter
10:30 am - 11:00 am

Funday Monday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

About Ottenheimer Library

Facebook Post
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

FB/TW Book Lover's Day

Both Facebook and Twitter
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Another weekend gone

Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Tue 9 Aug
Last Day for Early Registration
Twitter
8:00 am - 8:30 am
Gender Neutral Pronouns
Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
https://app.teamweek.com/#timeline

3/10

6/27/2016

Teamweek

Wed 10 Aug
Check out Ottenheimer Library when...
Twitter
9:00 am - 9:30 am

Spelling is important
Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Campus Alert Notification

Facebook Post
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

Textbooks
Facebook Post

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

When it comes to buying textbooks, ...

Twitter
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Perks of being an UALR Trojan

Twitter
9:00 am - 9:30 am

Free Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus for...

Facebook Post
11:00 am - 11:30 am

The Semester is coming

Both Facebook and Twitter
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

UWC Orientation
Both Facebook and Twitter
8:00 am - 8:30 am

Move in day is tomorrow @UALR

Twitter
9:30 am - 10:00 am

Infograph of hours
Both Facebook and Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Fandom Friday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

Social Media Group Meeting

Social Media Group Meeting
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Thu 11 Aug

The art of nap taking is a college lear...

Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Fri 12 Aug

Sat 13 Aug
Happy National Left Handed Day, we don't care if you are l...
Both Facebook and Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Housing Move In Day

Both Facebook and Twitter

11:00 am - 11:30 am

Sun 14 Aug
14 tips for new college students
Twitter

15 - 21 Aug

https://app.teamweek.com/#timeline

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

4/10

6/27/2016

Teamweek

15 - 21 Aug

Classes Start this Week

Mon 15 Aug
Trojan Daze
Facebook Post

9:00 am - 9:30 am

Trojan Daze is all week this week @U...

Twitter
9:00 am - 9:30 am

Reminder Post about being closed

Both Facebook and Twitter
10:30 am - 11:00 am

Funday Monday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

Come check out the UWC

Facebook Post
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Tue 16 Aug
Classes Start Tomorrow
Both Facebook and Twitter
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Classes Start

Late Registration/Senior Citizen Regi...

Both Facebook and Twitter
1:30 pm - 2:00 pm

College Class Checklist

Both Facebook and Twitter
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Feeling a little lost? Stop by the UWC...

Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Infograph of Hours
Both Facebook and Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Come check out the UWC

Facebook Post
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Oxford commas vid

Youtube Video

Social Media Group Meeting

Social Media Group Meeting
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

First Week of Classes

Both Facebook and Twitter
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Wed 17 Aug
First day of class post
Both Facebook and Twitter
8:00 am - 8:30 am

Thu 18 Aug
Check out the newest edition of MLA
Both Facebook and Twitter
9:00 am - 9:30 am

10:30 am - 11:00 am

At the UWC we can help you out with...

Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Fri 19 Aug
Fandom Friday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm
Good luck tonight @LittleRockSoc
Twitter
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

https://app.teamweek.com/#timeline

5/10

6/27/2016

Teamweek

Sat 20 Aug
Children's Book Character Quiz
Both Facebook and Twitter

10:00 am - 10:30 am

Sun 21 Aug
Sunday Homework
Both Facebook and Twitter

10:00 am - 10:30 am

22 - 28 Aug
Mon 22 Aug
Reminder Post about being closed
Both Facebook and Twitter
10:30 am - 11:00 am

Funday Monday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

In the UWC we have software to help...

Both Facebook and Twitter
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

@UALR teachers, don't forget that th...

Twitter
9:30 am - 10:00 am

Registration
Facebook Post

The empty wallet of a college student

Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

Intern Birthday Bio: Tanner

Both Facebook and Twitter
10:30 am - 11:00 am

Everybody on campus this morning

Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Late/Senior Citizen
Registration Ends

Tue 23 Aug
Stop procrastination before it starts a...
Both Facebook and Twitter
9:00 am - 9:30 am
Synonym
Twitter

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Wed 24 Aug
Stay up to date on campus news with...
Twitter
9:30 am - 10:00 am
https://app.teamweek.com/#timeline

6/10

6/27/2016

Teamweek

UALR Forum
Facebook Post

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Even we can't save you at this point

Twitter
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Thu 25 Aug

+ Add task

Don't forget to check out @UALRMar...

Twitter
9:00 am - 9:30 am

The classrooms with the big desks ar...

Twitter
10:00 am - 10:30 am

UWC Tours
Facebook Post

We think #5 is legit ;)
Twitter

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

UALR Maroon Mob

Facebook Post

10:30 am - 11:00 am

2:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Fri 26 Aug
Stop Content

Good Luck @LittleRock VB today and...

Twitter
8:30 am - 9:00 am

UPC Meet and Greet

Both Facebook and Twitter
11:00 am - 11:30 am

Fandom Friday
Both Facebook and Twitter
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

Social Media Group Meeting

Social Media Group Meeting
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Good luck tonight and Sunday @Littl...

Twitter
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Sat 27 Aug
Movie Night: Jurassic World
Both Facebook and Twitter

Sun 28 Aug
Recipes for College Students
Both Facebook and Twitter

10:00 am - 10:30 am

Need help?

10:00 am - 10:30 am

29 Aug - 4 Sep
Mon 29 Aug
https://app.teamweek.com/#timeline

7/10

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