Admitted Student Day Social media campaign

April 6, 2013

Admitted Student Day is a fun-filled, full-day event that provides admitted students and their families a chance to visit CU-Boulder before deciding to confirm their intent to enroll with the university. This year, the University of Colorado Boulder Office of Admissions ramped up its efforts to incorporate social media into its overall communication and marketing strategies for the event. Since Admitted Student Day is such an exciting time, it provided an excellent opportunity to utilize multiple social media channels and tactics to engage and share photos, information about the event and excitement amongst our newly admitted students. During the weeks leading up to the event, the communication and marketing team for the Office of Admissions centered its strategic communication efforts on promoting the use of its three main social media outlets during Admitted Student Day: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Class of 2017 Facebook Page : We created a Facebook page for the Class of 2017 (the newly admitted students) before the event so individuals could connect with peers, ask questions about the admissions process, find potential roommates, discuss majors and programs and post photos.

#CUBLDR17:

Each year, our team creates a hashtag unique to Admitted Student Day so visitors can engage with our office and other event attendees. Past hashtags include #ASD and #CUASD. This year, we wanted to create a hashtag not only unique to Admitted Student Day, but one that could be used to continually connect with the Class of 2017.

We had students use #CUBLDR17 on Twitter and Instagram to share tweets and photos throughout the day…

Strategies and Tactics: After we established the Class of 2017 Facebook page and #CUBLDR17, we created a list of strategies and tactics to help us brainstorm creative ways to use our social media outlets and newly developed hashtag. The strategies we carried out throughout the event included:

• A social media email campaign

• Creating posters advertising the use of social media throughout the event

• A Twitter scavenger hunt to find missing Ralphies throughout campus

• Publish a Storify event to collect user-generated contest from Admitted Student Day

Social Media Email Campaign: In order to increase awareness of our social media outlets, our team created two emails we sent to admitted students signed up for the event prior to Admitted Student Day. The emails shared our usernames and #CUBLDR17 to encourage students to start connecting with us before they arrived in Boulder for the event. The emails also encouraged students to use social media while at the event.

Social Media Posters: Our team created posters encouraging the use of social media throughout Admitted Student Day and exclusively advertising our #CUBLDR17 hashtag. We hung the posters at various locations across campus; including, at information booths, check-in tables, classrooms where sessions were held and inside buildings. The purpose of the poster was to draw attention to social media and create engagement throughout the event.

#CUBLDR17 on Twitter: We used Twitter for mainly three reasons: share tidbits of information during academic sessions; send clues for our Ralphie Scavenger Hunt; and connect with students attending the event. Counselors and event attendees were encouraged to include #CUBLDR17 at the end of every tweet so individuals could follow along.

Ralphie Scavenger Hunt

Academic Sessions & Connecting with Students

#CUBLDR17 on Instagram: Event attendees were encouraged to take pictures at Admitted Student Day throughout the day and post them using our hashtag #CUBLDR17 on Instagram.

Storify: Lastly, our team used the social media platform known as Storify to wrap-up the day. Storify is an online tool used to curate various social media content. We used it to create a collection and tell a story about Admitted Student Day 2013 using the content generated by everyone involved with the event and posted the link to the story on our Facebook and Twitter page thanking everyone for a great day.

www.storify.com/mycuboulder/admitted-student-day-2013

Our results: Our strategies and tactics aiming to increase the use of social media on Admitted Student Day 2013 proved successful based on analytical data collected.

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As you can see, we had a significant increase of Twitter engagement on Admitted Student Day compared to our average Twitter traffic throughout the month of April.

Our results:

• 68 new ‘likes’ on our main Facebook page on April 3, 2013 after sending the social media emails prior to the event • 317 pageviews on our main Facebook page the day of the event on April 6, 2013 • We reached 42,257 people total between April 3, 2013 - April 9, 2013 on Facebook • We had 617 people create a story about our page from April 3, 2013 – April 9, 2013

Reports from Facebook.com