At Boston University, many of us are one-person shows in our departments when it comes to social media, and even then, it’s often not the only task on our job description. Because of this, it isn’t always easy to create new content for our channels without help.
Enter my Admissions co-workers. Each fall, most of them are on the road visiting high schools, attending college fairs, and interviewing potential students. They’re also taking great photos of their travels, like this one of Prague by our Assistant Director, Liam McCartney:
The problem was that as good as these pictures were, it didn’t really make sense to post them on our social media channels. They looked more like vacation photos than our team hard at work.
This year, we decided to solve that problem by sending our staff on the road with their very own Rhett cut-outs (shout out to BU Athletics for giving us permission to use his likeness). This was an idea modeled after Flat Stanley’s travels.
As anyone who works in Admissions knows, fall is a very busy time of year, so the other challenge was finding a fast and easy way to share the photos. We came up with the idea of creating a closed Facebook group for our team. Here, they shared their photos that I was then able to pull for social media. On top of that, the group became a way for our staff to stay connected at a time when many of them aren’t in the office. Because Facebook automatically sends a notification anytime a new post is added, it was hard not to keep in touch. And better still, those constant notifications served as reminders to others to post.
The results were even better than we could have hoped! We soon saw Rhett visiting high schools,
connecting with prospective students,
exploring national landmarks,
exploring international landmarks,
and even making friends with sea lions.
Once we had the content, the next step was posting it onto our social media channels. Unified by the hashtag, #RhettontheRoad, we took a different approach depending on the channel. On Pinterest, the photos were perfect for a Rhett on the Road board. On Facebook, we created a photo album. And on Twitter and Instagram, we posted on Tuesdays, taking advantage of the popular hashtag, #TravelTuesday, to generate views from users who may not have seen the pictures otherwise. Using Twitter, we also used #RhettontheRoad to promote upcoming visits across the globe.
Overall, the campaign was a big success. On Instagram, our top post had 121 likes. On Facebook, posts reached more than 9,900 people, and on Twitter, tweets reached more than 20,600 users. We were very pleased with the results and expect Rhett to be a repeat travel companion again next fall.
This post originally appeared on the BU Social Media blog.