On March 23rd, approximately 750 University of Michigan students poured into the Michigan Union in the hopes of finding their passions. Each year, the Newnan Academic Advising Center invites students to the Major/Minor Expo, an ideal chance for students to explore the world of academic opportunities at LSA and throughout the University. The Expo brings together representatives from nearly every discipline so that students can gather information that will help them decide which areas of study they’d most like to pursue.
OBJECTIVES
LSA Social Media played an integral role in promoting the Major/Minor Expo and facilitating conversation around students discovering intriguing areas of study. This year, we focused on the following objectives while strategizing and executing our social media promotions:
- Expose students to disciplines that are related to their passions.
- Increase attendance at the event.
- Create engagement around the process of selecting a major and/or minor.
RESULTS
We saw the most success for garnering exposure using Twitter in the week leading up to the Expo and on the day of the event. We encouraged students and departments to use the #exploreLSA hashtag, which allowed us to cross-promote original content. We projected our live Twitter feed on a large screen at the event to broadcast real-time updates from LSA and each department.
The #exploreLSA hashtag accumulated 66 posts, resulting in 813,000 organic impressions and 1,264 engagements. Of these posts, only 18 were from LSA Social Media, which generated 336,100 impressions, suggesting significant engagement around the hashtag.
Our Facebook event page achieved a social reach of 5,700 and 74 engagements. Our Facebook promotional posts on our main page achieved a reach exceeding 12,000 people and over 30,000 impressions.
Our paid media posts reached 5,480 people and received 9,696 impressions, resulting in 28 RSVPs to the event page. This campaign’s cost per Event Response of $1.10 was lower than 80% of similar ad sets.
In many of our social media posts, we provided a link to the Major/Minor Expo Facebook Event page to gauge interest and promote the Expo. This link generated 992 hits and was most frequently visited two days before the event and on the day of the event.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BDQ4bvmL2Md/?taken-by=umichlsa
https://www.instagram.com/p/BDOYTdAr2IP/?taken-by=umichlsa
Snapchat
We took over UM Social’s Snapchat account on the day of the Expo to film a “Story.” We used this platform to feature highlights of the event and to promote our social media gift card contests. Of the account’s 10K followers, our Story received 8,111 views.
MAKING SOCIAL…SOCIAL
A particularly successful execution of ours was the “Interactive Career Wheel.” We realized the untapped potential of the “Impact of Major on Career Path,” a digital visualization of data collected from LSA alumni interviews that shows the relationship between LSA majors and eventual career paths. Students were asked to recreate this digital wheel in physical space as a way for students to learn about the academic opportunities throughout U-M and to understand the value of an LSA degree.
We provided links to the “Impact of Major on Career Path” on business cards at the Expo and in the Snapchat Story. Promoting this link at the Major/Minor Expo generated ~30 page visits on the day of the event and ~20 page visits one week later. These two peaks in page views suggests our “Interactive Career Wheel” successfully exposed students to the usefulness of this tool.
To facilitate engagement with the career wheel, we offered participants the chance to enter a gift card contest upon completing the activity. 76 attendees participated in the Interactive Career Wheel, 53 of whom entered the gift card contest. We leveraged photos and videos of students participating in the career wheel on all social channels, and plan on donating the final product to Newnan.
CONCLUSION
Overall, the efforts were a great success. The social media impressions were widespread and featured the breadth of the services offered by the Expo, Newnan, and the departments.
We were impressed by the spike in page visits to the online version of the interactive career path wheel which we credit to the exposure at the Expo.
Most surprising, perhaps, was the effectiveness of the SnapChat geofilter; students are responding well on this platform, cementing its roll in our social media toolkit for the near future.