How To Social Media

Even if you have a Facebook profile already you may want to consider creating a Page to act as the hub for your Facebook campaign. Although you'll be building followers from scratch it will help you keep your personal profile secure, and will prevent you from having hundreds of friend requests from students you may not know.

Facebook Pages can also have multiple administrators, meaning you can get your friends and campiagn team to post, and reply, on your behalf so you're not having to sit watching the screen 24/7 in fear of missing a comment or having an empty timeline when you're busy doing other things.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. Make sure you're also using photos and videos as promotional tools on Facebook. When scrolling through their newsfeed, it can be easy for students to miss a status update compared to a creative and interesting photo, or an attention grabbing video. You don't have to be a budding David Bailey or Spielberg, but a quick snap with your phone or a few words to camera could be the difference between someone scrolling past your message and someone listening to it.

As well as most of the students here at Derby; clubs, societies, Part Time Officers, and reps all have social media accounts on Facebook. If you link up with other people willing to spread your posts you'll be surprised how far your message can go. Network with people who might share your values or back your manifesto and ask them to share your posts and further your reach. Some may say no, but anyone who says yes takes you one step further in reach, votes, and closer to the win.

Hashtags aren't just a bit of fun, along with @mentions they form the basis of content discovery within Instagram. People will follow hashtags, people will search for hashtags, and people will tap on new ones via posts they see. Making sure your hashtag game is on point will give you a leg up in your Instagram campaign.

Occasionally you might want to throw in a comedy hashtag that goes on a little too long; we all miss summers full of #iscreamyouscreamweallscreamforicecream posts, but the longer your hashtag gets the harder it gets to read it. If you start thinking you need to capitalise words within a hashtag then you're probably at the point where you'd be better off trying to shorten it instead.

You know what you've written, because you've written it. But people reading it might not, so take a look at your hashtag (especially if it's one you've made rather than an existing tag) with fresh eyes: Susan may be throwing an Album Party for her new record – but the people coming to #susanalbumparty might not be the type of people she expected.

While Instagram will let you add 30 hashtags to a post, we'd suggest that between 8-12 is the sweet spot. You can do less (or more) if you need to, it's probably better to go under than force in some random ones if you can't think of any.

People follow hashtags, and different people will follow different hashtags. So think of the reach you're after with your post:

• Local: #derby #midlands
• National: #uk #nus
• Global: #uni #students

#coffeelover covers a much broader audience than #blendslatte – though you might want both on your morning Blends coffee photo to maximise those that could see it.

Although they only have a life of 24 hours, Instagram stories are a key tool to increasing visibility on campus.You can interact directly with your audience with a stream of videos/photos, boomerangs, filters, and even live streams. Swiping up on the screen when you're creatinga story will allow you to add text, GIFs, annotations, and more. Be creative and tell your story! Unlike your normal feed you don't need to worry so much about the quality of your posts or spamming too many posts in a short time when using stories.

And if your story gets a lot of engagement you can 'highlight' it, and instead of disappearing after 24hours it'll save to your Instagram page for even more people to see.