Digital to Personal: “Liking” Your Fans Online and In Person

in Engagement

Social media is a digital experience. Tweets. Posts. Snaps. Chats. Who needs real life interaction these days? Whether it’s connecting with old friends on Facebook, shopping for new shoes on Zappos or meeting the love of your life on Match, it is possible to accomplish almost anything online. Ironically, when it came time to develop our social strategy for back-to-school, we included an event where we could create a real-life, face-to-face experience with our students. How retro of us. ✌

This year, one of our goals was to make an intentional effort to connect with incoming freshmen. Our hope is to reel ’em in early, getting them to “like” and “follow” our social channels while they’re new, then hopefully they’ll stick with us for their entire college career. Any hey, if we could increase our follower base on each platform by 5,000 each fall, that would be pretty sweet.

To connect with students, #CSUSocial participated in the Ram Welcome Street Fair (which is part of our Welcome Week program). We created a fun experience including a life-size Instagram cut-out and encouraged students to share the photos on their own channels using #RamWelcome. We also shared a few on ours.

Street Fair IG

We had a prize wheel (that actually had good prizes) and in order to spin, students had to connect on the spot to two of our social channels. Mostly they opted for Snapchat and Instagram. We handed out CSU t-shirts, CSU pennants, CAM the Ram bobble heads and a chance to win $100 from the CSU Bookstore. At times, the line to spin our wheel was a 30-minute wait.

Instead of keeping our interaction with students digital, we got personal. And we even had a chance to inform students about our Social Media Street Team (more on the #CSUStreetTeam in future blogs). During the duration of Ram Welcome, we grew our audience count across all channels with thousands of new “likes” and “follows” and #RamWelcome was used on 1,044 Instagram posts. But most importantly, we connected personally with students. We “liked” them in person.

Here’s a short video from the event.

video