In my past life working at other institutions, tagging never seemed worth the effort. Smaller accounts wouldn’t boost our reach, and bigger accounts always ignored our content. So why bother?
But here at CSU, my mindset has shifted—especially working on ever-growing executive-level accounts like President Parsons’ social media presence.
When I first started here, President Parsons or someone from the President’s Office would always send me notes about who to tag in posts. At first, I thought this was because I was new and didn’t know who was who (which I didn’t). But over the past two and a half years, I’ve learned there’s something much deeper going on.
Tagging everyone featured in photos, videos, or captions is pretty freaking simple, but the impact is profound: it makes people, departments and community partners feel seen. And ultimately, it helps strengthen relationships—both in person and online—not just with President Parsons, but with all of CSU.
It demonstrates you’re thinking about the person or group after the content was created, you care enough to alert them that the content is out there, and you’re driving traffic to their accounts. We didn’t just take or post content to elevate ourselves without elevating the other group, too.
I don’t have empirical data proving that @mentioning people improves my account’s engagement metrics. But I do track when those folks reshare our content, when students screenshot their photo and reshare to their stories, and when someone sends a thank you for being tagged. Those moments compound over time and are immensely important. And we’ve heard consistent feedback from campus partners that when they’re tagged on LinkedIn especially, their content reaches more people.
Other thoughts on social media amplification
Last year, President Parsons’ social media accounts got a shout-out on a great episode of Enrollify with Jenny Li Fowler featuring Dunroe’s CEO Cameron MacNiven. In that episode, he shared that college presidents are one of the types of higher education accounts that get asked to collaborate with the most—and President Parsons’ accounts are no exception. President Parsons gets a ton of collaboration requests, and we accept a ton of them because it’s yet another way to signal and amplify that a person’s or group’s content across campus matters.
Another way that we’re amplifying content across our social media ecosystem is through Ram Reshares (formally Friday Features), where we collect 10-20 posts per week to reshare into stories. Content varies depending on what’s happening across campus, who’s at the top of our feed, and what requests have been made. And this one in particular has been a really positive way to touch tons of CSU accounts.
So, it’s time to step up your @tagging game
While I’m hoping this post doesn’t spark an avalanche of collab or Ram Reshare requests (though I really do invite you to drop me a line if you have something to share on President Parsons’ accounts), it’s a reminder to us all about the value of not just community management, but utilizing the tools we have to amplify and uplift our CSU social media community. A tag, mention, collab, reshare, comment, like—whatever it is—can go a long way. And if we all, especially the larger CSU accounts, commit to highlighting accounts across our ecosystem in these small ways, we’re all going to rise.
Go Rams!