Texas AdGrad Social Media Team Adopts Spredfast Software

Managing Social Media: A Student’s Perspective

A team of four students, a web master, the advertising graduate coordinator, and a professor first met in August of 2010 to discuss the adoption of managing the University of Texas's Advertising and Public Relations department’s social media accounts. Provided by the previous group of students was a twelve page, elaborately detailed document illustrating best practices, maintenance techniques, content categorization and other useful information for managing three Texas AdGrad social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Every week the former team created extensive, detailed reports for each network, and exchanged over 1,000 e-mails throughout the semester, planning, creating and implementing content. They tracked all interactions, manually counting each week’s results. The team tracked growth in followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook. They tracked the amount of interaction and quality of interaction between the Texas AdGrad brand and its consumers. Comprehensively, the team created an extension of the advertising department’s image in the digital 2.0 world of social media. However, the next team wanted more time to create content, to communicate more effectively with each other, and to have access to a tool that tracks and records all variables of interest.  They adopted Spredfast early September 2010.

Since adopting Spredfast, a content management system and social CRM tool, the software has gone beyond exceeding the team's expectations as an effective management tool and platform. Spredfast offers a blanket of social media management components. It enables social listening, allows benchmarking and simple management tools; Spredfast is highly scalable as well.

Based in Austin, Spredfast first released their social media management tool in 2008 and has rapidly led the industry as a platform designed for enterprise-class solutions. For the Texas AdGrad team, this meant more time to focus on the messaging. As Spredfast provides a tool that monitors all content and interaction, the team has had more time to become more educated in best practice implementation, interview industry thought-leaders, attend academic meetings and truly contribute to the brand’s content in a meaningful manner.

As a tool that provides one location to schedule posts, the need for e-mail communication has almost been completely alleviated. Each manager can schedule content prior to publishing, and can view and instantly respond to followers that communicate with Texas AdGrad. Spredfast compiles interaction history between the Texas AdGrad voice and each follower and provides robust analytics allowing for endless metrics analysis.

Spredfast has allowed the Texas AdGrad social media team the ability to meet goals and develop more effective and original content. As full-time students, like full-time professionals, there is lot on the team's plate and Spredfast has greatly simplified the job of being social media managers.