Our team is focused on staying on top of trends for our clients, specifically in the higher education space. Our Social Media Strategist, Jamie Garrett has put together her top content strategies to create interactions and higher performance for your accounts this spring.
Welcome to the Wasteland! If you’re reading this, you might be a university social media manager scouring the internets looking for fodder. The time between the fall semester/holidays and before commencement can be notoriously difficult. The inspiration well can be dry, and it can be difficult to find compelling content that ties directly to student/university activity.
Fret not! We are here to share some ideas and strategies that can help bolster your calendar (and serve as evergreen inspiration year-round)!
Let’s get into it.
Holidays and National Days
This might seem like a no-brainer, but capitalizing on holidays, especially some of the lesser-known-and-sounds-made-up ones, is actually a good idea. This will require that you lean into the humor. Injecting humor into your marketing strategy can do wonders, especially when it comes to smoothing over the rough edges of ads that might raise eyebrows. It’s all about the art of distraction and surprise. Get it right, and you’ll find your audience not only forgiving but also embracing what they might have otherwise shunned. The secret sauce? Making sure the laugh fits the product like a glove. For the thinkers and the feelers in your audience, humor needs to be more than just a chuckle; it should weave seamlessly into the message you’re trying to convey. So, when you’re planning your next campaign, remember: a spoonful of humor helps the message go down, turning potential negatives into undeniable positives with a side of smiles.
Laughs and kitschy niches are your friend. Just make sure trends fit your brand. You want to apply the trend to fit you, not the other way around. Even when having a laugh and finding ways to stay relevant, never compromise your core brand voice and make sure you’re still staying true to who you and your company are.
Campus Beauty
Showcasing the crown jewel of your brand is ALWAYS a good idea and in the category of “campus beauty” there can be a lot of qualifying kinds of content. The basic gist is showcasing content that pulls at heart strings, inspires with nostalgia, and provides vivid, captivating visuals that clearly shows your university.
By increasing focus on this strategy, you’ll be able to capitalize on the natural evolution of your campus’ beauty. Springtime ushers in revived florals, technicolor greens, and often blue skies. Campuses are usually abuzz with more than students, faculty, and staff. Wildlife also got the memo about the lovely weather, and they are there too, ready to provide fun and relatable content. (Think dogs on campus, squirrels being weird and cute, and bees enjoying the campus flowers.)
The beauty, and the tragedy, of this time of year is that it is fleeting. Spring won’t last and soon you will be greeted with hot haze of summer. So, take advantage of campus beauty in all its glory.
TikTok Content
TikTok is the new frontier. Everywhere you look can be riches and success, but be wary, there may also be potential pitfalls. TikTok is still a great place to explore and tap into during this stretch. The trick to navigating and succeeding in this landscape is much like tip #1 – stay true to your brand, but don’t be afraid to take risks. These risks might be things like viral dances, cute photo opportunities and poses, lip synching to a piece of audio, man on the street interviews, etc. Using student ambassadors for ideas like these not only keeps you innately on brand, and your face out of camera view, but will enrich your video with relevance and some secured impressions and engagement from your students’ friends and followers. Remember, sharing is caring!
If you don’t have any willing and able bodies to help you, you can also lean into trending audio. Pairing a popular song with some nice shots or video of campus can be a hit! Just make sure the video is done as well as possible and shoot with necessary tools to ensure best possible product, ie. Tripods, gimbles, good cameras, etc.
Year-In-Review and Pre-Commencement
Accepting the end is near is not only healthy but can also be a great strategy for content. Looking back at the school year with your followers is a great way to not only highlight your greatest hits, but also create good and relevant content. This tactic is traditionally used around New Year’s/end of the year, but the end of a school year is still applicable. You could easily do a month-by-month highlight by pulling the top performing post from each month and giving a little blurb/recap of what the post was about. If you save this strategy for April and you don’t end the school year until the end of May that is easily a post-a-week for those two months.
Around the same time, depending on your school’s calendar, you can start ramping up Commencement buzz. This might look like posting past commencement photos with questions and polls for soon-to-be grads, you could create content around grad hat decorating, generate before-you-graduate checklists, and could collaborate with schools and the alumni association on campus for cross-posting, sharing, and sharing ideas.
Need more inspo and want to talk shop? We are more than happy to meet with you to discuss strategy and concepts that could work well for your brand and vision. Reach out to us today and let’s start creating!
BOSTON, MARS
