Building a social community takes resources — namely, people and time — and any effort to minimize the role of these resources seems to cause nothing but problems. When social media managers cut corners in the name of efficiency, language gets lost and the personal connection so many people seek in the medium never develops.

There is no Social Media Easy Button. Stop looking for it. Sure, auto posts save time, but they’re anything but social.

Learn from the following: A water main break last week at Webster University caused the school to cancel evening classes. We updated the website, posted news to Facebook, and tweeted out pertinent information. A local news station paid attention and relayed the important news on its own site, which auto-fed to Twitter:

Webster University cancels evening bit.ly/JUqeuH #FOX2Now #STL

— FOX2now (@FOX2now) May 2, 2012

For the record, Webster University did not cancel the entire evening, just evening classes.

Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Buffer and other applications certainly make life easy for community managers. They allows us to schedule tweets, track click-through rates and monitor conversation from multiple accounts.

The problem is that they also allows us to be lazy. Our audiences deserve more from us. And it doesn’t help that Facebook appears to penalize users who post from these third-party applications.

Hubspot last month conducted an experiment to study the impact of how people post. It found content published through a 3rd-party applications (such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc) suffered 67 percent fewer likes and 60 percent fewer clicks than manually posted content.

The message here is simple. How you post matters. Creating content that people like, share and discuss takes time. The benefits of an engagement community, however, are certainly still worth the effort.

They laugh because, while they all have accounts and occasionally login to update them, they are keenly aware of the perception that no one actually uses it. Their target audiences — namely prospective students and alumni donors — just aren’t active there.

Colleges and universities were some of the first on board when Google+ in November offered brand pages to organizations. Mashable highlighted the trend in “16+ Universities Dive into Google+ Brand Pages,” but it’s depressing to look at what has happened to those 16+ brand pages since the post first appeared.

Nine of the 16+ universities haven’t posted anything to their brand pages since the week when Mashable touted their activity. Only 25 percent of the 16+ highlighted pages have posted Google+ content in the past 90 days.

We’re missing the boat. Google+ doesn’t need to overtake Twitter or siphon users from Facebook. It’s all about search.

While Facebook continues to grow as a top referral source to university websites around the world, it still doesn’t come close to the traffic driven by Google’s search engine. The potential to have your college or university rank higher in the search engine results page simply because of its activity on Google Plus is reason enough to engage on the platform.

Edward J. Black, the president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, last month wrote about the changing world of search when he said:

Links may be the foundation on which the Internet was built, but they are not its future. “Likes” have become the new links that drive our connections online.

And in the case of Google, it’s taking those “likes” — or +1’s if that’s what you want to call them — and tying them to traffic that matters in search engine results.

It’s time to get back on the boat.

Colleges and universities around the country are always searching for better ways to tell their story. They struggle with the simple ways to talk about all they have going on. Timeline takes great strides to make it easier.

Timeline streamlines the brand experience into a scrollable story. It allows administrators to craft that story in ways the old wall never would.

The trick is that building that story takes time and effort. So while administrators have until March 30 to make adjustments as to how their timeline will appear, it’s best to start now. Here’s five quick tips to get you started while still in preview mode:

Select a Sweet Cover Pic

The cover pic is the most visible change to a Timeline-enhanced brand page. It’s bold and big — 851 x 315 pixels, to be exact. Use every last pixel to be creative and demonstrate the vibrant nature of campus. Do not take this opportunity to share another photo of a girl studying under a tree. We’ve seen that shot before.

Remember the rules: Cover pics cannot contain contact information, calls to action or references to other Facebook features. Essentially this means administrators can no longer put an arrow pointing to the ‘like’ button to increase a fan base.

Arrange Applications and Customize Appearance

Custom applications used to be banished to a small list on the left of a page where they were hard to organize and harder to find. No longer. The new Facebook Timeline allows administrators to add up to 12 applications to a page and selects the first four to highlight front and center.

These highlighted applications take up some prime real estate and there is no reason not to capitalize on that fact. Administrators can customize the images for each app (beyond the photos and videos) by editing the settings for each individual application. New images need to be 111 pixels high by 74 pixels wide.

Pin the Most Important Content

Seems pinning is the latest rage, even on Facebook. Timeline allows adminisrators to “pin” certain content to the top of a page for up to seven days before it falls back into place. It’s a great feature to highlight specific content and, in turn, push down content you’d rather not have people see.

Get Visual with Content

Most research on Facebook suggests photos are more engaging than the traditional status update. So why not get more visual? The new Timeline increased the size of common photos and allows certain posts to stretch across the page.

If Facebook is going to allow page admins to extend an image all the way across the page, use it when the time is appropriate.

Go Back in Time

History and tradition run deep at most colleges and universities and the “milestones” feature of Timeline is a great way to demonstrate it. Set milestones to define the key moments in an institution’s history. The milestones are added to a date selector running down the right side that tells the story of a school established long before Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook.

Adding milestones may take some time, but the rich content it adds is worth it. Special tip: Opt out of publishing each milestone to the feed you don’t want to flood fans’ streams as you build a school’s story.

Walls without posts. Albums without photos. Brands without a fan.

Most often these accounts fail for one reason: They failed to set a goal in the first place.

Goals focus attention, push aside irrelevant actions and force us to work through the inevitable setbacks that are sure to occur. They energize us on the down days and challenge us to achieve something greater.

So often a bright-eyed wanna-be marketer will set up an account without asking the single most important question: “Why are we doing this anyway?”

The solution is to set a goal and stick to it.

Defining a goal

Imagine you could only have one result from a particular platform. What would it be?

Maybe you want to drive applications, increase engagement, or encourage more generous giving. You can’t do it all … at least not well, anyway. It’s the same as saying “Our social strategy is to be on every platform engaging with everyone.” It’s not a sustainable model.

Pick one action and dedicate everything you have to making it happen. This action is your goal.

Defining this goal makes it easier to build — and maintain — social media campaigns in the future. It clears up confusion and allows administrators to turn down suggestions that steer social media away from its intent.

A well-defined goal is the compass that continues to point you in the direction you wish to go. It shouldn’t be ignored or stripped of its importance.

Do or do not. There is no try.

At the end of the day a social media platform has to do something. It has to perform. If it’s going to add value to an institution, it has to generate results. It’s not enough to establish a presence and hope for the best. Goals put hope to bed.

It’s hard to argue with the success of a social media campaign that set measurable goals from Day One and met or exceeded those goals to demonstrate results.

So what’s your goal?

Credit Facebook with a high level of usability. Any wanna-be marketer with a profile can create a Facebook page is a matter of minutes. The problem, however, comes when expectations for that page fail to deliver the intended results.

The creation of a Facebook page is not a public relations panacea. It won’t immediately draw a crowd and it won’t build a fan base just because it exists. It can build brand awareness and generate business leads, but remember:

Managing a successful Facebook community takes an investment of time and effort.

There is no “silver bullet” when it comes to creating a successful page. There are no shortcuts. Yet, a well-run page can yield results.

Here’s few helpful tips to get going:

1. Start with a plan.

There are few questions one should ask before creating a page (or launching any online initiative, for that matter): What are we trying to accomplish? What are our goals? What’s the best way of getting there? How will we measure success?

Knowing the answers to these questions keep an effort focused and on target. No one wants to start cultivating a community only to come back six months later and wonder, “What am I trying to do here?”

2. Don’t skip the small stuff.

Facebook prods new page owners to enter only basic information — name, website, and a brief description of what the page is about. Failing to fill out more of the information tab is a mistake. The Info tab allows administrators to offer a more complete picture of an entity.

Administrators can add an address, mission, awards, products, e-mail and more. All this information becomes searchable and aids in an attempt to explain who you are and what you do.

3. Appoint more than one admin.

It’s never good to set a single point of failure. If an organization has more than two people working in it, there is little reason to limit access to only one person. Even if additional administrators never post to the page, they should be there to ensure continuity should one administrator move on.

4. Set a schedule and stick to it.

It’s not easy to stay on task, stay focused and build momentum. Good content doesn’t write itself. Perhaps this is part of the plan but the easiest way to keep on track is to lay the track ahead of time. Meet Content last year wrote a great post about creating a social media calendar that’s always worth revisiting.

5. Take advantage of Insights.

It’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Insights is one of the greatest perks of administering a professional page. These statistics provide detailed information about likes, comments and shares, as well as detailed demographics segmenting people into age groups and locations. Do yourself a favor and export the stats to measure them against the goals set in step one.

6. Give it time to grow.

Successful pages don’t appear overnight. They take time. Even the most popular Fortune 500 corporate account started with one person liking it. Stay the course. If your page adds value to the audience you’re trying to reach, it will grow.

If email is sent from a corporate email address, it represents the corporation that created it. Uniform email signatures present a professional image while still providing brand consistency across departments, divisions, offices and locations.

A professional email signature isn’t the place to offer inspirational quotes or try out colorful designs with fun, new fonts. You wouldn’t scrawl a Comic Sans quote on each and every business card, so why would you include one in an email?

Ultimately, a signature exists to answer three questions: Who are you? Where are you from? How do I reach you? Here are a few guidelines to keep a signature professional while still answering the basics:

Keep it Short, Keep it Simple

An email signature need not be longer than the email itself. Let less be more. The recommended signature fits on four lines and should never go more than six. Go wider rather than longer, and use pipes to separate components.

Make sure to include your name, the name of your company, your title and the best method for getting in touch with you.

There is no need to include your email address in your signature since it’s just as easy to click “reply.” And while random quotes are fun among family and friends, they can risk offending professional colleagues who may not share the same points of inspiration.

Drop the Images

An image only increases the email’s file size and may be blocked before it’s opened. Most email clients store images as attachments or block them altogether, meaning the recipient will have to guess if it’s a real attachment or not.

Different email clients process images in different ways and there’s no way to ensure the image will correctly appear across the board, even if it’s the company logo. When compounded, images hinder delivery performance and increase storage quotas. In short, drop the images.

Forget Fun Fonts

Standard-sized fonts, black in color, are one of the only ways to ensure a signature will appear the same regardless of the client each recipient uses. Stay away from big, tiny, or rainbow-colored fonts. Simple fonts are easier to read on computer monitors and mobile devices than more complex script and cursive fonts.

Check the Rules

There are some countries with specific rules for what information needs to appear in an email signature. Most often these rules require a company name, registration number and place of registration. Check with the country where you are located to see if these rules apply.

If anything, Twitter will keep you on your toes.

The microblogging giant earlier this month announced plans to rework its interface in an effort to make the service faster and simpler. According to Twitter: “We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new.”

I applaud the changes. But, with any alteration to the social media landscape, it means I have some learning to do.

Here’s my first four takeaways from the new Twitter design:

Boost the Quality of Your Content.

The new interface embeds photos, videos and conversations directly in Tweets, allowing the entire story to be seen at a glance. It’s no secret that photos and video are more engaging types of content than a simple status update. If you aren’t including them in your Twitter content strategy, now is the time to begin. A litany of links is not a content strategy.

Interaction Matters.

Twitter now bundles and serves up a handful of similar story lines for each user under the Discover tab. The stories are curated based on who they follow and the stories they’ve interacted with in the past. There’s some incredible potential here. Imagine a high school student who follows all the schools where she may be applying. Wouldn’t you want to show up in her list of discoveries when it comes time to making a choice? Engaging content is the only key to getting there.

Don’t Skip the Small Stuff.

Profile information is put front and center in the new Twitter design. All this information is searchable and key to helping new followers find you in the first place. The profile it the one place where people can learn about an account at a glance, who operates it and what it represents. There’s even room for a photo and a link back to your website.

Be Prepared.

More changes are on the way. In conjunction with the launch of the new Twitter interface, Twitter announced the creation of brand pages. Brand pages allow for a larger logo, tagline and page-promoted tweets. Only a handful of Fortune 500 companies are in the system now, but it’s only a matter of time before these pages are rolled out across the platform. It’s best to get ready now.

Klout scores mean little when it comes to real social media success.

The online measurement tool does a great job of entertaining those who care about the difference between a retweet and a mention, but it falls short in measuring true online influence.

Klout scores range from 1 to 100; with a higher score assumed to represent a greater level of influence. The score attempts to measure how many people you influence (true reach); how much you influence them (amplification); and, how influential they are (network score).

The company claims that Klout influencers “create thousands of pieces of [user-generated content] and millions of impressions for a brand’s new product, initiative or campaign.” I cannot argue this point. They do.

Yet Klout cannot take the next step. Klout does a great job of determining the number and reach of the people talking about your brand online, but it doesn’t know if any of these people are actually taking action with your brand because of it.

Actions taken that impact business are the only way to measure real influence. In higher education, the number of inquiries, applications, or online donations demonstrates this influence. Klout doesn’t take into account any of these.

In other words: Unless Klout addresses your specific goals for engaging in social media, the score it spits out is useless beyond immediate amusement.

So how can you use Klout?

Use it for fun. Use it for a benchmark the competition. Just don’t use it to demonstrate the success of your social media efforts. You’ll have to do that yourself.

The statistics are interesting in that they confirm what most marketers have known for a while — more dynamic content leads to greater levels of engagement. However, it’s not safe to assume these statistics can be applied to all pages.

The digital marketing agency reported the following engagement rates for the four types of content most commonly posted in Facebook pages:

• Photos: 0.37 percent
• Videos: 0.31 percent
• Text: 0.27 percent
• Links: 0.15 percent

These numbers represent a general reaction to content, but they’re sure to differ from page to page. The only way for an organization to measure the engagement levels of content by type is to actually go out and measure it.

Here are five simples steps to replicating the Web Liquid study with data of your own:

1. Export ‘Post Level’ Data.

The online data Facebook displays is great, but the good stuff is in the download. Export three months worth of data from the Facebook Insights tab. Be sure to specify “Post-Level Data.”

Once the Excel file is downloaded, work within the second tab across the bottom, “Lifetime Talking About This.” This is the tab that lists each post, the date it was published and the number of times it was liked, commented on, or shared.

2. Create a Column for Content Types.

The online Insights interface is great because it places an icon next to line of post data to define the content type — status update, photo, video and link. Unfortunately, the downloaded data doesn’t differentiate so an additional column needs to be added.

Simply insert a column after the Message and title it ‘Content Type.’ Code each line accordingly as one of Facebook’s four types of content. This is the most labor-intensive part of the process but even it doesn’t take much time.

3. Add Impressions.

The “Lifetime Talking About This” tab doesn’t include the total number of impressions so that information has to be copied from the Key Metrics tab and pasted into your working document. Feel free to paste over the ‘shares’ column since that doesn’t figure into the Web Liquid equation. Just make sure the impressions line up with the correct message.

4. Sort by content type and calculate sums.

Once the messages are sorted by content type it’s easy to add those selected cells to provide a sum of likes, comments and impressions for each type. It might help to break them into four separate groups just to keep the numbers straight per content type.

5. Calculate engagement.

It’s easy to calculate engagement the same way it was done in the study. Add together the likes, comments, and shares and divide by the number of impressions. The final figure roughly displays the percentage of people who took action — or were engaged — because of a post.

The study isn’t perfect but for those unsure of what content is working for them, it’s a great first step to understanding.

So how do these figures align with what you’re finding?

Google on Monday unveiled its pages feature that allows organizations — including institutions of higher learning — to create brand personas and engage with the more than 40 million people already using Google+.

It’s about time.

The Google+ platform is a slick one, blending some of the best features of Facebook and Twitter in an easy-to-use interface. I said it before and I’ll say it again: Google+ can work for higher education.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The platform features a social environment where it is easy to build connections, focus on specific interests and keep track of who sees what. The introduction of business pages only ups the ante.

Here are a few of the features colleges and universities should note:

• Hangouts: One-click video conversations have to be one of the coolest features Google+ has going. It allows brands to put people in face-to-face situations, without leaving the own environment. Imagine chats between admission counselors and prospective students, current students and advisors; or, professors and the general public.
• Multiple Administrators: I spent some time trying to figure it out but could not discover how to add multiple administrators to a page. I assume this will be remedied over time but, until it is, schools may want to make clear just who does the posting.
• Direct Connect from Google Search: Direct Connect allows people to directly connect with a brand’s Google+ page simply putting the ‘+’ sign at the start of a Google search. If Google can alter the way people search and discover our brands, marketers need to pay attention.

And some of the best advances to Google+ — specifically addressing the desire to measure meaning in all this new activity — is still yet to come:

… in the coming weeks we will be launching tools to give you access to as much data as possible about your Google+ Page and +1 activity: who’s interacting with your page and how; your users’ demographics; and info about their social activities like +1′s, shares and comments — all to help you learn how social campaigns affect your bottom line.

Sure there may be some that bemoan Google+ and compile a list of features the social network doesn’t include. I won’t be one of them. If this tool can help build better connections and expand the reach of a brand, you can bet I’ll be on board.

Care to share your thoughts on the future of Google+? Please add them below.