Giving Back to the Community Generating Content for You

User-generated content is about as authentic as it gets and it’s what our audience craves, especially in higher education. I use it as often as I can because our community captures the essence of who we are far better than I typically can and their perspectives are valuable to us and the audiences we hope to reach. In doing so I interact with a lot of great people, most often students, and one of the parts I most enjoy about the work I do is finding ways to provide just as much value back to those people sharing their content and work as we get out of sharing it.

This has become somewhat of a mantra for me. And as much as I hate to admit it, it has plagued me since launching our student-run Instagram account @herewegosaints, arguably our most successful social media endeavor yet. As an institution, we get so much out of having an this account, but after the students had completed their week, I had nothing to give them except a big thank you. I really struggled with this. They had done a lot of work (whether they realized it or not). It never felt like enough and I knew it wasn't enough, but I had no money to do anything special for them. So what could I do?

In October, I found a decent answer. A recent graduate who ran the account as a student visited and mentioned he had talked about his work with @herewegosaints during job interviews but he didn't know how to really talk about it beyond "taking over Instagram for a week."

I reminded him about the meeting we had before he took it over and how he spent 25-30 minutes visualizing and planning his week with me. What did he have going on? What were some cool ways to capture his life that would fit on Instagram? We had talked about Instagram as a platform and the kinds of content he liked and didn’t like on there and that had inspired some ideas on what to do and what not to do (I like when they realize these things on their own, rather than me telling them). We had done a lot of what I do as a social media manager in my head every day in terms of content creation and planning. I thought to myself there’s a lot of value in helping students run through those same questions and exercises.

After our visit, he left my office with a much better sense of how he could talk about @herewegosaints in a meaningful way. I was left knowing that a big value for the students who had run the account was giving them the ability to discuss @herewegosaints with potential employers.  

So, I went back and created a @herewegosaints Storify account that catalogs each individual week. Now when a student takes over the account (“Fun! Exciting! I’m #SLUfamous!”), I follow up their week with an email and their Storify link and briefly outline all the cool things they can do with it, along with some insights on how they can share and discuss their takeover experience:

• Share with family and friends
• Add the Storify link to LinkedIn (This has proven to be rather difficult – does anyone know why LinkedIn doesn’t play nice with Storify links? I currently advise students to add it as a project.)
• Tell employers about being trusted with the University’s brand and reputation
• Tell employers about the planning it required and the reasons for capturing what you did the way you did (PS: All that planning you did before the week started? That’s called a strategy and employers want to hear you did that so they know you have a deeper understanding of using social media beyond personal use)
• For students studying the sciences or fields that may appear unrelated to communications: the power of the liberal arts, yo! Creative and thoughtful communications are important in any field
• Tips on how to include it on a resume
• Some data about their specific week 
•  “Did you know? This link will be a positive component to your digital identity!”
• Fun @herewegosaints facts (mission behind it, the targeted audiences, the awards it has won, etc.) to add context for employers

Yes, surprised student. Running @herewegosaints doesn’t just benefit St. Lawrence; it could benefit you well beyond those seven days. No, really. It can!

Our students need experiences they can include on their resumes and in discussions with potential employers. More importantly, we need to help students see the value in every opportunity they have, no matter the size of a project because it's not always as apparent to them as it is to us. We understand the broader context of what they're doing - many of them won't realize it until much, much later.

As I said in my presentation at Confab Higher Ed in Atlanta:

By doing small things like this (and it is small - it takes less than five minutes a week to do this!), students know I'm not just interested in them as content creators. I'm interested in them as humans, too.

Side note/Bonus: Thanks to the Storify account, I can now offer my Admissions and Development colleagues access to specific weeks that may help them in recruiting students or showcasing a specific aspect of campus life that an interested donor prospect might enjoy. Don’t you just love when one simple and FREE project gives you multiple ways to share content with varied audiences all at once?

Image via http://corelaborate.psesd.org/.

What I've Learned Thanks to Our Student-Run Instagram Account

As I was flipping through my calendar a couple of weeks ago and realizing that yes, it is actually April (where did this year go?!), I started thinking back to all of the projects my student social media team and I have taken on since last August. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: 28 students later, we’re more than six months in to @herewegosaints, our student-run Instagram account, arguably our biggest initiative that we took on this year.

I can still remember exactly how I felt as we geared up to launch this account and what itwas like those first few weeks. It was nerve-wracking and scary, but also exhilarating. We had a lot of questions: Would students love it? Would we get enough students interested? Would it be appealing to prospective students? Would it be different enough to warrant a separate account from the main university account? Six months later, the answer is the same to each of these questions: YES.

In the first month, we had more than 800 followers. Since, we’ve continued to grow our fan base and are closing in on 1,500 followers (it took our main account nearly 10 months to reach that number) and engagement per post remains steady. Interest hasn’t dropped off – in fact, I think it’s only increased over time. I still get emails every week from students who want to take it over and our students and followers are always looking forward to Mondays when we reveal who is running it next.

I could write a book about all we’ve learned and how it’s changed what we do and how we do it here at St. Lawrence, but in the interest of time – mine and yours! – I thought I’d share some of the biggest takeaways and lessons learned here from creating @herewegosaints.

The Need for Content Strategy
At first when I met with students interested in running the account, it was about filling weeks. Then as we got deeper into the fall semester and had more than enough interest, I was able to shift the tone of those initial meetings from “Thanks for being interested – we’ve signed you up!” to getting them to think strategically.

Here are some of the questions I ask when students inquire about running the account:

• What are you involved with on campus? 
• What week(s) are you busiest? How would you show off your busy week on Instagram? 
• How will your week be different than other weeks? 
• What is your St. Lawrence story and how will you plan on sharing that on Instagram?
• What do you love about Instagram? 
• Tell me about a recent post you saw that you liked and tell me why you liked it; then tell me about a recent post you didn’t like and why.

"A lot of my friends from home say that we are abnormally committed to St. Lawrence. I don't understand what they're talking about..." One of our most popular posts by senior John Balderston. John developed a comprehensive content calendar for his week (his own idea!) and the time he spent putting it together paid off - it was by far one of our most popular weeks.

I spend a lot of time on St. Lawrence’s social content strategy and I know from experience that planning posts and content out serves us extremely well. In asking these questions, I got students to think ahead. Treating them like the content strategists they were going to be for the week was critical and has helped tremendously in constantly providing our followers with engaging content and our students with an amazing experience.  In these conversations with students, they seem to really enjoy the fact that we're trying to make sure they're being thoughtful and be purposeful with what they are doing. 

Creating a Second Account

Only a small group of students knew that Matt Burr, a St. Lawrence graduate & drummer for Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, was visiting campus to give our student-run music venue a custom drum kit. Amy Yao, the student running @herewegosaints that week, happened to be one of them (an absolute coincidence - I had no idea!). She was able to capture an amazing moment because she had the keys to this account.

When we launched @herewegosaints, I talked with several people who wondered why we created a separate account. Internally, we had briefly discussed the pros and cons to this and decided a separate account could be something we share with prospective students and say it’s completely student-owned. Looking back, I don’t think this would have been nearly as successful had we done it through the main university account. Here’s why:

• It wonderfully complements the main university account. One thing that was missing from our Instagram content overall was content from inside the St. Lawrence experience - the day-to-day action on campus. This is difficult for me to capture because I'm not living it. @herewegosaints  is able to do that for us. The account focuses much more on taking people behind the scenes of life at St. Lawrence, whereas our main account focuses on highlights and showing off our campus.  We know we have a good amount of overlap in terms of followers between the two accounts (but we've found prospective students oftentimes engage with @herewegosaints first), so when a student is showing the @herewegosaints fans an event they are actively taking part in, we can be showing another so we don’t miss anything – for a one-person show like myself, this has actually helped me a lot. 
• Students trust the account. Now that we’re into our 28^th week, students who have run the account have told their friends about their experience. The word is out: it’s unfiltered, students have direct access and it’s a lot of fun. Because of this, students share the account with friends at other schools or high school students. It's real. It's theirs. They like that.
• Students understand – and love - the responsibility. At first, one of our concerns was giving students the password, but this is what has led to such buy-in from them. Every student I talk with about their week appreciates that we trust them with the account and that we’re letting them tell their own story in their own way.

What We Didn’t See Coming  

• Students are learning about opportunities they have at St. Lawrence through this account. I’m not sure why, but I never considered this account to be a resource. But in my many meetings with students, they’ve told me that they’ve learned about this class, or that research fellowship, or this club or that favorite meal through following this account. Students enjoy the different perspectives because they are learning something new about St. Lawrence, along with the rest of us. 
• Running the account is real-world experience. We have a lot of students interested in PR/communications/marketing and for them, running the account is something they can talk about in an interview. I've had students mention this to me and it reinforces why it's so critical to make sure I help them think strategically about what they are doing.
• It has shifted how our students think about their own content. This blew me away a little: I met with a student earlier this winter about running the account. After talking through the logistics, she casually said, “You know, every time I post to my personal account now I ask myself, ‘Would I post this if I were running @herewegosaints? Or how would I change this post if I were running @herewegosaints?’” She’s not the only one who has mentioned this either – I’ve spoken to four or five students who have echoed those same thoughts. And while this is anecdotal, I think the quality of the photos I see being posted by our community have gotten better and certainly the amount of content shared has increased dramatically. Our community is much more engaged.
• Students are proud to go to St. Lawrence, just because we have this account. When I meet with students, they tell me how great it is that we give them the chance to do something like this. They truly feel ownership over this account, which is exactly what I was hoping for. 

What Have I Learned?

I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about who our current students are, what they care about and what experiences are offered at St. Lawrence today. This account has given me the chance to see what our students are talking about and care about in real time. This helps me with the other parts of my job in creating content for publications and the web.

As the main social media manager on campus, I find I have limited time to test the waters and try different types of content to see what resonates. While running this account, students have done a little bit of this for me without realizing they are doing so! In a lot of ways, it has helped reshape our overall approach on Instagram.

Other Fun Awesomeness

Since we launched our account in September, I’ve spoken with several colleagues at different institutions who have thought about launching similar accounts or initiatives. Take a look at the great things they are doing!

Valdosta State University (@vstateexperience)
Humboldt State University (@livefromhsu)
Webster University (@mywebsteru)
Southwestern University (The Captain at the Helm)

Have you created a similar account or initiative? What have you learned?

A Thank You & 12 Cents Go a Long Way

A while ago, I blogged about some frustrations with Instagram and how it's not as social as I'd like it to be. I want to "retweet" a community member's photo so they can experience ALL THE LIKES instead of me! But alas, Instagram hasn't built this feature in yet.

So the question for me became, "How can we share these likes and this awesomeness with the people whose content we're sharing so they know they're appreciated?"

I started by sending emails to people thanking them, but that only goes so far. After all, how many emails do we get a day? When I expressed my frustrations with my student social media team, one member came up with a great idea: thank you postcards, featuring that student's Instagram post.

Um. Brilliant.


When I share a community member's photo on the main St. Lawrence account, I wait a few days until the vast majority of the likes have come in, then take a screenshot of the post as it appears on our account and open it in Photoshop on my PC.

I built a high-resolution 4" x 6" template in Photoshop that looks like the university's flag (shown), then take the screenshot and place it on top. (Note: I am no whiz in Photoshop, as you can see. Just think how much better you can do!)

I upload the finished product to my phone and head to the local drugstore, which has a wonderful Kodak kiosk that prints these for 12 cents a pop and has them all printed for me in under five minutes. They look fantastic, too!

Cards moments before being sent!

Once printed, I hand write notes on the back, thanking the user for letting us repost the photo. I always make sure I find something that makes the post unique - was it in the Top 5 liked photos ever? Top 10? Did someone leave a great comment on it? I share those tidbits in my note. I always sign it "@StLawrenceU" (word on the street is they love that!). I then send them via campus mail (we're a small residential campus) to their on-campus mailboxes.

This is typically the reaction I see when a student finds one of these in his or her mailbox:

We don't just do this for students - I've done this for faculty and staff, too. When the day comes and we share an alum's photo, they'll get one in the snail mail, too. Who doesn't enjoy getting a random love note in the mail from their alma mater?!

In terms of social media currency, I learned early on that "liking" a student's photo got us some great street credit (and helped us earn trust on the platform and elsewhere, too). When we started asking to repost, it upped the social ante and we found a lot more students using the hashtag and directly tagging us in their posts, hoping we'd share. Now students are posting these cards when they get them. They can hold in their hands how much we value them. This goes so much deeper than a mention or a repost - it's on a whole different level.

I know; doing this is just a little thing, a very, very small part of what I do. There are no analytics to measure here, no way to assign any "tangible" value or ROI. My only takeaway is that this little thing could be making someone's day. And I'm perfectly content with that being the only outcome.

A huge shout out to Lexi Williams, a student here at St. Lawrence University; I may be able to write this post and share it with you all, but she's the one who had this idea. I refuse to take any of the credit as it all needs to go to her and my student team (and in case you were wondering about the value of getting students involved with your work, here's a great example of why. They have the best ideas!).

What ways do you thank your community members for sharing content?

Students Taking Over = Insta(gram)-Success

Over the summer, I was trying to get out of my own way. When you work in marketing and communications at a school you love, you want the stories and people who make that place great to be what shines through, not a bunch of marketing jargon. I'm lucky that our students love this place and more often than not, they're able to tell our stories better than I could. It was time to let them do that.

I looked at where we've been successful this year on social media and Instagram was the clear winner - it's the one place our students have really engaged with us and it was the first platform where they felt comfortable doing so with any of our "official" accounts. I'm a one-woman show when it comes to our social media efforts, so there's no way I could ever be at every event or game to capture those quintessential St. Lawrence moments for our main Instagram account. Our students often are. That's why @herewegosaints was born.

After talking with my colleagues and with the guidance of my student social media team, we launched our second Instagram account, which is taken over by a new student each week and open to any student who is interested in volunteering to do it. It would open up a lot of opportunities for us to tell the collective St. Lawrence story in an authentic way while celebrating the experiences of our students (and validating those experiences and them, which is something that is very important to me. Yay students! You're so wonderful). Our students are all over Instagram, love it when we like their photos, and like it even more when we ask to share them. This was our chance to show them we value and trust them.

Have I had concerns? Sure. It's always nerve-wracking when you're trying something new and doing so with students driving the project - but that's where you get the best results. I was nervous this wouldn't catch on or that we wouldn't get enough students interested in running the account. My team (five students) and I decided they would be the first set of students to run it so we could get a sense of the issues we might face and whether or not it would resonate with students. If it didn't work, we could just shut it down before anyone really knew about it. The first member of my student social media team took it over on September 30, just four weeks ago today.

We've done minimal advertising of the account. I posted a screenshot of the account on our main Instagram account a few days into our first week with it and each Monday when someone new takes over, I tweet the name of the student running the account. The lack of advertising has been deliberate to see if word-of-mouth was enough to propel this project forward. Was it going to be edgy enough to withstand our college's "cool" factor?

When I posted the screenshot on our account, the response to the post was minimal - 30-40 likes when our posts typically average about 200 likes. For a second I was worried, until I noticed they were following the new account instead. In four hours, the account jumped from 25 followers to over 200. Since that day, we've nearly tripled that number and reached 535 followers as of this post. For a school with just 2,400 students, this growth has been outrageous for us (I should note it took our main account more than three months to reach that many followers). On Friday, our student newspaper did a great feature on the new account - it's the first time any of our social media projects have gotten any ink. That's a win in my book.

My student team says there's been a huge buzz about it on campus since it was launched. A lot of students asked them what it was like to run it and how they could do the same. The rules are simple and I require each student who wants to take it over to meet with me so they know who I am and can ask any questions they have. My student team has made a lot of recommendations of people they know we could trust with it, and I've received several emails from interested students. They're excited, and that makes me excited.

Some interesting tidbits: My student team members are comprised of juniors and seniors, so I don't often remember they may have siblings or friends in high school. When one of my team members took it over for the week, she highly publicized her takeover of the account on her personal accounts. What I didn't expect was her sister, a high school senior, to share it. She created an image telling her high school friends to follow the account, too, since her sister was running it. (Mind blown yet? Mine was. I can't make that kind of awesome - and free! - promotion up.) On that one day alone, we gained more than 130 new followers. (In related news, who wants to hire this girl? I do.)

A few members of my student team are also admissions ambassadors and have been sharing this new account when meeting and communicating with prospective students. They love knowing they can follow an account run by students instead of an institution-run account. I'm interested to see where this goes as a recruiting tool for us - I know our admissions colleagues have started spreading the word about it, too.

I was also shocked by the incredibly positive reaction I've gotten from our alumni. One said, "Meg, I actually search for the account on Instagram to make sure I haven't missed anything." Who could ask for anything more in a new endeavor? All parts of our community audience are enjoying this, not just the people it was created for.

While I've enjoyed having a controlled group of students that I know running the account these first four weeks, I'm really excited to meet new students across campus and let them run with it. I think the fact that we have opened this up to people who are interested and not just my team is a critical part of its popularity. An account run by the team would be cool, but it would still be seen as "controlled" posts and messages. I'm excited to experiment with this approach. Do I expect hiccups? Yes. But I expect even more awesome (and that'll cure those hiccups any day).

Have questions? Want to learn more? I'll be presenting about this during the HigherEdExperts' Social Media Conference on December 4. Sign up (by Nov. 16!) and tune in to find out how this project has progressed - another plus is you'll listen to 11 of the people I admire most in higher education present on their own work. It's a win-win!

You can also reach me by leaving a comment below or by email: megan.bernier@gmail.com. 

Is Instagram Really "Social"?

I appreciate people who are taking the time to investigate social media platforms' Terms of Service like Karine Joly, who has started a weekly "Social Media TOS Tuesday." She recently blogged about Instagram's Terms of Service (TOS) and what we can and can't do on our brands' accounts.

One of the points Karine made was that re-posting other users' content on your account violates Instagram's TOS. I've seen many colleges and universities doing this and doing it well - many ask for permission to re-post and then credit the person behind the original post, which I think is a critical piece to going this route. But this is frowned upon by Instagram because it's not the brand's original content.

This is also true on Facebook. Creating a Facebook album of your community's best Instagram photos also violates the TOS, unless you're using an API or linking directly to the person's content. For our community, students don't want us necessarily linking to their accounts. In talking with some of our students, they'd love for us to post their content, but even though their accounts are public (since we can see their content), they don't want just anyone looking at them. 

Learning all of this was a real eye-opener for me as Instagram has become a very popular tool for us and where we've had a lot of success in the last 10 months. It's made me question Instagram: Does their TOS allow us to be truly "social" on the platform?  Karine's posts leave me extremely frustrated with Instagram (not with her, of course!) and thinking undoubtedly yes because in many ways, they don't allow us to foster a community of sharing and engagement like we've been trained to do with other tools. Rather, the platform focuses on metrics such as simply "liking" photos, something I don't think means much at all..

In higher education, many social media "teams" and managers are actually one-person shows who can't be everywhere at once and not always around to grab that perfect sunset photo or events that students are capturing every day. Re-posting photos is a way to show your community the bigger picture of your brand (and crowd-sources, which often yields much better content!) and I'd think would make the content creator feel really good about what they're doing and feel even better about your institution.

I'm all about giving credit where credit is due, which is what this all comes down to - I don't care about likes or comments on our own posts, but pushing out great content that reflects who we really are -that's what social media is all about. I think linking to a person's Instagram account in the caption/comments, you're linking people back to the original content creator. Should that violate anything?

If we choose to follow Instagram's TOS, it really limits us in what we're doing for our community. If they created a re-post option where the person's work that was re-posted received all the likes and comments, then great! I actually like that better than the idea of a brand getting all the engagement for another's work. They should be the ones seeing and relishing in that. Then they'd see how valued their work is and be really proud. Our community wants that and in my fantasy social media world, I'll hope for a resolution of some kind as Instagram evolves - either in creating a re-post option or amending the TOS.

Until then, for those schools or brands who have found success in re-posting, will you continue doing so? What are you doing to stay in check with Instagram's TOS, if anything?

Ensuring Value and Purpose in a College's Instagram Contest

Knowing Instagram was the most popular platform our students were using on a daily basis and getting inspiration from several colleges (most notably Elizabethtown College and Donna Talarico's work),  my student social media team and I decided it was time to do something fun on the photo-sharing platform. So in April, we hosted our university's first ever social media contest - an Instagram photo-a-day challenge.

We joined Instagram in late October. I spent the first five months listening to, learning about and educating our audience on there, so I was excited to try this. But I didn't want to do it just to do it, or to get more followers, or something else that didn't mean anything. So how could we do something fun AND have it be valuable for both our audience AND the University?

Strategy

For our audience, it was a game: post a photo every day using #SLUphotoaday that correlated to that day's theme. For my team and myself, it was strategically planned. We chose April for a few reasons:

• April is the first month in Northern New York that you  might - MIGHT - see signs of spring and not a whole lot of snow.
• Our University's birthday is April 3.
• It's a busy month on campus with Springfest Weekend, sports contests, end-of-year concerts, etc.

While these factors definitely played a role in why we chose April, the biggest thing for me was that April is a critical month in the admissions cycle. Why not encourage students to post content every day that you can feature all over the web at the same time high school students are making their college decisions?

The other part of the strategy was deciding on each day's theme. (I should note - they had the best ideas. Another reason to get students involved!). The pride our students and alumni have in this place is incredible; playing off that was going to be key to making this 'cool' and something our students would participate in.

Promotion

We started promotion just five days before April 1. We printed a 120" x 45" banner and hung it in our student center with each day's theme. We posted the contest on Instagram and Facebook. We made fliers for the residence halls. Other than that, I charged the team with sharing the news word-of-mouth.

What happened?

The next month was a whirlwind (hence the month-long delay in posting this). I could go day-by-day, but this post is already long enough. Here are some highlights:

• We had more than 135 people play (I know there were people I couldn't see playing because of private accounts) and close to 1,200 submissions.
• In the first seven days, we had over 500 submissions. On Day 3 (our university's birthday), I tallied over 100 photos posted - the most of any day.
• Our followers grew 27.3% in that one month.
• Not only did students play, but several alumni played (a few played every day!) and we even had a parent take part in the daily fun. That was a surprise, since the daily themes were really geared toward those on-campus. I was blown away at the lengths some alumni (and the parent) went to play every day! 

Why was it valuable for us?

In my opinion, I think this project was the first time our audience saw us giving them something fun to do and in return, it gave us some street credit with our students and younger alumni. While I've seen increased engagement since taking over our social media efforts in August, it's been more so on the alumni side than with our students. That has slowly changed, but April was sort of a mini social-revolution for us.

Since the beginning of the contest, students have been interacting and talking with us much more frequently. They are tagging us in their photos and posts. We are communicating and sharing together! When we've asked our audience for photos or content, I've seen a jump in the number of submissions we get. For me, it was a great way to end a year of social media growth on campus and I think set the stage for an even bigger social media 'boom' here this upcoming year.

I think it's important to point out here that while we saw an exciting jump in followers, this was not a goal for us. We didn't get 230+ new followers because we ran a contest; we earned the trust of 230+ new followers because we provided exciting and relevant content in an engaging way and encouraged others to join us in doing so.


Other Fun Points to Note

• When sharing photos on Facebook and Twitter, I saw a jump in new people playing or others playing again.
• I saw a slight increase in new followers on Admitted Student Days, most likely because students visiting saw the large poster in the student center and heard tour guides talking about the contest.
• Really thinking about the daily themes and how they could help us share St. Lawrence with others paid off incredibly for us in terms of re-purposing content. For instance, on our university's birthday, the theme was "What I love about SLU." We had more than 100 posts and shared the best in an album on Facebook later that week as it was the perfect way to capture why our audience loves us, instead of us preaching about why we're so great.
• Remember that "official" Instagram hashtag I spent a long time educating our audience on? Before April 1, less than 350 photos used the tag. By the end of the month, we were close to 700. Far more students are now using the hashtag than they were before, which means I'm finding their awesome content faster and easier (and others are, too).
• We've had several requests to do it again - so people liked it!

Why was it valuable for them?

You mean besides the prizes? We used a ton of student content we got from participants on other platforms and a number of students took to social media to express their happiness about it. By liking their photos, commenting on them and sharing them, we validated their efforts. They felt appreciated, which was great - because they were (and are).

People also enjoyed seeing how others saw St. Lawrence. Why did their friend love St. Lawrence? Where is everyone's favorite view? Our community learned more about each other in a fun way.

Again, I think because we spent the time to make sure the themes were centered around what makes SLU special and because it was done at the end of the semester, it offered our audience a chance to reflect and appreciate this place. We even heard as much from participants on the last day.

For the Next Time

Of course, this wasn't perfect. We will definitely make adjustments, but based on the number of requests I've gotten from students and departments to do something similar, we'll be doing more things like it - keeping in mind the value to us and the value for them.

Another lesson learned? The weather gods are never on your side. We chose our daily themes six weeks in advance and we picked one day to be themed "Today's Weather," hoping it would be a gloriously sunny day. What we did was jinx ourselves.

Technically, our contest had 15 winners, but I think St. Lawrence and - more importantly - our audience won.

Have questions about what we did? Insights on other successes? I'd love to hear them! Feel free to reach out to me or leave a comment.

Why I Invest Time in Instagram (And Why You Should, Too)

I've been responsible for our university's main social media channels for just over six months and I have had (and continue) to do a lot of listening and learning. One of the biggest lessons I've learned has been that our audience wants to know how we want them to use social media - and they're looking for us to guide them. One of the places I've been most successful in implementing this is on a smaller platform with big opportunities: Instagram.

I knew our students were using Instagram but before jumping on the platform, I wanted to look around and see what and how they were posting and figure out how we might use the platform to reach this particular audience. What I learned was:

• Their stuff wasn't terrible. In fact, a lot of what they posted was really awesome content I wish I had known existed.  (I'm sure the less awesome stuff is out there, just mostly on private accounts or not using any university-specific tags.)
• When they were trying to tag us, they used multiple hashtags: #slu, #stlawrence, #stlawrenceuniversity, #stlawu, etc. The list went on, and these were often hashtags used for a variety of other purposes, so they weren't strictly St. Lawrence.

Instagram is about more than posting really sweet filtered photos and getting a lot of likes; it's about building a community. I knew if we were going to be on the platform, we needed to find a way to create that. 

That's why when we launched our account, we created one hashtag we wanted people to use and actively started promoting it in our Instagram bio and on each of our photos. I didn't want our audience just adding the hashtags to their content; I wanted them to use it for what it's true purpose- to give people interested in St. Lawrence a feed they can follow for content collected from others, too.

I knew I couldn't just rely on people reading our bio and buying in to the hashtag; I was going to have to lay some serious groundwork if I wanted Instagram to work with and for us. I spent hours searching the hashtags they were using - liking and commenting on their (appropriate) photos. They LOVED us telling them we liked their stuff, which became evident as scores of them began following us... and they also started sharing more (and even better) content.

When They Bought In

During campus events (like this big snowfall), I actively promoted the hashtag across platforms like Twitter and Facebook, where I encouraged people to look at the hashtag feed - not our own - to see all the great things our contributors were posting, It helped that I went back into photos our account had liked, took a screenshot and posted that across all our platforms, like the one below:

When we did this, a lot of people figured out we didn't establish the hashtag just for us to follow along, but for everyone to enjoy. This specific post not only got more members of our audience to start using the hashtag on their photos, but they started browsing and some even went back through their own feeds and added the hashtag to older photos they had taken around campus. It was working! We had given our audience a little bit of help and they were really running with it.

What the "Other" Hashtags Gave Us: Prospective Student Engagement

When I was going through the hashtags our students were using, I noticed prospective students were using them when they got mail from us, visited campus or when they got accepted. Interacting with them opened up a lot of future engagement opportunities - they asked questions, followed us and sometimes went to Facebook and Twitter and followed us there, too. (Every so often they use our hashtag in later posts or add it to the one I've found and I simultaneously squeal with joy!)

Instagram is our fastest-growing platform and every minute I spend on there is giving me more information about our community and what it likes, but also what it needs from us. Instagram has illustrated how educating and guiding our audience on the ways we want them to use these platforms equals quality and meaningful engagement. 

If you've ever doubted Instagram's ROI for your college or university, I hope this shows you it can be - and is - worthwhile. What cool things are you doing on Instagram that are building your brand and resonating with your audience?