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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 22 JANUARY, 2017
EVENTS
In the past decade, social media platforms
have become
increasingly important tools in the higher education
marketing and communications professional’s arsenal.
Why? It gives us the opportunity to connect with our
audiences in real-time and at minimal cost. In the world
of reduced advertising funds and budget cuts everywhere,
social media is where we get to flex our creative muscles
and leverage major university events and activities to
reconnect with and expand our online fan base. As the
largest campus event, our 2016 graduation ceremonies
were a perfect opportunity.
We chose to visually profile the graduating class –
usingmultimedia content to tell their stories; create online
interest and participation in the ceremonies; and increase
our fans and reach.
When one considers that at the St Augustine Campus
we have over 50K fans and 10K followers on Facebook and
Twitter respectively, developing a social media strategy for
graduation meant taking our knowledge of the audience
and mapping out the kinds of content that people would
want to see. We used photos and video to develop a
campaign that would resonate. Our guiding theme: simple
but effective.
We maximised in-house resources and chose to focus
on three areas of innovation: introducing Graduation
Correspondent Interviews with graduates after each
ceremony; using Facebook Live as a second live streaming
medium to complement the existing UStream channel,
and publishing the Humans of New York type stories to
profile our graduates. We decided on the unique hashtag
#UWIGrad2016
to brand all our content across both
Facebook and Twitter. The use of the hashtag allowed us
to see how users were interacting with our content and
sharing their own.
What were we able to achieve across those three days?
On Facebook, we generated 1,394,565 impressions.
Impressions refer to the number of times a post generated
by UWI St. Augustine was displayed on Facebook.
41,666 users were engaged and we reached 397,339 users.
We had 72,550 video views (these were viewers of both
the Facebook Live stream as well as our interviews)
and we also earned 472 new fans. The top 10 countries
engaging with our content were those residing in Trinidad
and Tobago (naturally) as well as the US, Jamaica,
Guyana, Canada, Barbados, the UK, St. Vincent and the
Grenadines, Grenada and St. Lucia.
Whilst our reach was less on Twitter, we were still able
to generate 63.3K impressions and engage 7,952 users. It
was interesting that the top performing post on Twitter
was the same as Facebook – the image of student Amanda
Thomas in tribal makeup. On Twitter, that Tweet amassed
22,115K impressions and engaged 3,877 users on Twitter.
When compared to last year, the introduction of the
three areas of innovation in the approach resulted in a
61% growth in impressions, a 200% growth in reach, a
131% growth in new fans and 200% growth in engagement
– this was all on our Facebook page. In retrospect, the
strategy we developed focused heavily on Facebook
interaction. As a result, whilst there was a 24% growth in
impressions on Twitter, our engagement levels dipped by
25% and there was also a 51% decline in our number of
new followers. Developing specific strategy for Twitter for
the 2017 ceremonies, therefore, is one of our key lessons.
#UWIGrad2016:
In a Digital World
B Y C H R I S T I N E N A N T O N
Christine Nanton is the Marketing and Communications Officer with responsibility for conceptualising how social and other new media
are integrated into the Marketing and Communications function at the St Augustine Campus
Being one of four campuses of the largest and longest
standing university in the region, serving The UWI
has a unique position of influence among some of the
newly emerging institutions. Here are some of our major
takeaways for graduation.
USE LIVE–STREAMING TO CONNECT WITH
THE WIDER COMMUNITY
– Facebook Live
was a great strategy for increasing the reach of
the ceremonies and helping boost our social
engagement overall.
GET TO KNOWYOUR GRADUATING CLASS
–
what are the interesting stories emerging from the
graduating class? Find these graduates and capture
them. These personal accounts resonate best with
the audience.
MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA A TEAM EFFORT
– every
member of the team (even those who did not
have a specific responsibility for social media)
were apprised of the strategy and on the lookout
for content and would alert the team to capture
a moment worth sharing. You don’t need fancy
equipment to create great content – we shot a lot
of our student interviews with a smartphone. A
steady hand is all it takes.
USE STUDENT TALENT
– postgraduate
student Nikoli Edwards was this year’s graduation
correspondent. Nikoli has broadcasting experience
which made him a great asset to our team. As a
student, he was also flexible enough to be on-call
for each of the ceremonies.
GET CAMPUS MANAGEMENT INVOLVED
–
have leaders on your campus who are socially
inclined? Let them help you with content. I mean,
how else could we have landed this ‘behind the
scenes’ selfie of our Campus Principal, Professor
Brian Copeland and Chancellor, Sir George Alleyne?
107,803
persons reached
7,195
reactions, comments
and shares
141,917
persons reached
12,346
reactions, comments
and shares
