College and university professors, instructors and faculty are struggling with leveraging social media correctly in order to better engage their students. As Covid 19 and its variants continue, higher education institutions are wrestling with the best ways to leverage technology tools that truly resonate with their students.
If you are college or university professor or faculty member and just care about the number of followers you have, this isn’t the post for you. But if the thought of getting a 100% of your students to see your school’s content keeps you up at night, then you’re in the right place.
Of course, 100% engagement is virtually impossible, but this article is meant to show you 3 ways to easily increase your student engagement on your social channels.
1. Instagram Stories are one of the most underutilized sections of social media right now.
Yes, Instagram Reels is the Number One place for views right now, but to build a community on your campus, you will need to understand how to use the Stories feature correctly. You can think of Instagram Reels as your top of funnel to grow your student followers and then your Stories to really build a closer community and engagement mechanism with them.
Here are some examples of Instagram stories.
Example A:
Example B:
However, here is how they can be more engaging and gain more interest from your student community. These are shorter, cleaner and more to the point. In short, more easily digestible and attractive.
For example A, in the initial post, there are too many companies on the story which will cause students to not pay attention to any of them. By simplifying the number of companies from 40+ to only 4, it allows the students to have something to grasp as they are skimming through the hundreds of stories they see each day.
You can feature any company, or you can keep these spots for the companies that are sponsors. I also added the “ask a question” sticker to let students be able to choose which of these companies is their “dream company” to increase engagement.
For example B, the number of stories were simplified into one. In the original series of stories, the only engagement possible is if the student wanted to learn more about the activity featured. It can be tough to get individuals off of Instagram, but it is much easier to get them to engage in a poll.
By combining the two Tuesday events into one and adding a poll on top, students can easily choose which they would prefer and then you can add in a final story with a link to all of the weekly events. This can also be a way to gather valuable data for your institution.
2. How to find and build relationships with “influencers” on campus
This is a strategy that not enough schools are utilizing. With a simple search of “University of Central Florida” in the location tab on Instagram, you will find several individuals with 10,000+ followers and if you go onto Youtube and typed in the same thing you can find individuals with tens of thousands of views on their UCF vlogs.
How do you reach out to these influencers?
It’s usually quite simple as many of these individuals aren’t used to getting reached out to by higher education institutions. Many times students will have their email linked in their bio or on their Youtube channel. However, it is better to approach them from genuine place of their interest to see if they’d like to work on a project together.
From a creator’s perspective, it is advisable to find ways to compensate the influencers that you work with, no matter how large or small. This can be in the form of payment or experience. Below are a couple of ideas that could work to increase engagement on campus and grow your following.
- If you are at a school with a large sports community, gather 5-10 influencers and give them all access to the next big game. That could mean courtside seats or even a whole catered suite. You can compensate with money and/or tell them that they can bring a friend. In exchange, you ask them to vlog, make a TikTok, post on Instagram, etc. It’s a win-win.
- Fund a scholarship for one of the influencers on campus. Reach out to the individual asking if he/she would like to run a giveaway for a scholarship at X university. It is likely that the individual that you work with will have far greater reach on their social media than you do. You (the university) get great exposure and positive brand awareness and the influencer gets to give away a scholarship to his/her followers improving their relationship with their community.
- Run a creator competition at your university. Becoming a creator is like building a startup and many individuals struggle to get started due to costs (buying a camera, editing equipment, etc.). Set a budget (I’d recommend $2.5K-$5K) that you can give away to help jump-start a creator’s journey at your university and work with the influencers on campus to promote that competition.
3. The ultimate growth hack for content.
Now that you understand how you can better engage your students. Here is the final growth hack that you’ll need to know.
Good content is always greater than any growth hack out there. It may be cliché, but it is true.
So many universities struggle with this. But this is the main reason why I was able to build a student community of over 300,000 students within a year while many universities struggle to engage their 3,000 students on campus. Social media content for students needs to look like it was created for students not for your administration. It is tough to find the balance between getting content approved by university administrators and pleasing the students.
But here is a way to bridge that gap. Ask your supervisor to allow you to try things once a week. When he/she says “yes,” keep track of all analytics and track the growth on your “tests”. As your “tests” start to outperform the “regular” content, you can use that as an argument as to why your university needs to continue to create content like this.
Nguyen will also be speaking Fierce Education's "Higher Education: Technology Profiles in Success - Fall" on Oct. 21. Register here.
Justin Nguyen is Founder of Declassified Media and the host of the Declassified College Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]