Webinar Recording: Secrets to a More Social Admissions Decision Day

Mallory Wood, mStoner’s director of marketing, and Bruce Floyd, University of Florida’s social media specialist, present a brand new case study on the concept and execution of #UF17.

The University of Florida took advantage of their admissions decision day celebrate their newest members of the Gator family. UF rallied around the hashtag #UF17 so their team could coordinate communications with the accepted students as the University sent out acceptance notifications online,. The results were dramatic — in roughly eight hours they saw 644 unique tweets from 966 individual Twitter contributors. These conversations totaled over 4.57 million timeline deliveries and reached 370,000 members of the Twitter community.

In our webinar, Mallory and Bruce examine: Campaign strategy, planning, and goal-setting. Campaign management. Measuring results and beyond.

Winning

Right before turning out the lights Friday night I decided to quickly check twitter.  I saw a tweet that has made me stop and reflect on my personal and professional life for the last 48 hours.

No, it wasn’t from Charlie Sheen. This tweet from Kyle James caught my attention.

I’m coming off of three weeks where I have clocked over 70 hours/week working on various projects for various jobs or people.  Among other things: I’m tired, I have neglected some relationships, and I haven’t had time to work out as much as I would like.

But I am not complaining. 

I give 110% to everything I do, I put in long hours of hard work, and being busy… well that is what I thrive on. 

I want to be busy.  And dare I admit it, I want to be successful. 

But so do you.

Kyle’s tweet reminded me why I work hard, because I want to achieve success in my career.  His tweet also reminded me that I am not the only one.  There are people in my field working more than me, harder than me, and they want success just as much as I do.

We all want to be “winning,” but we can’t all be winners.  This is a sobering reality.  Great success does not always follow long hours of hard work.  Yet, I don’t think great success can be achieved without long hours of hard work.

So what do we do?  Keep working hard, keep doing our best, and hope that it eventually pays off.

Should your bloggers be tweeters too?

Got Student Bloggers?

What else are you using them for?  Not to brag, but my SMC Bloggers are an impressive bunch and they’re doing a lot more than just blogging.  They are the face of St. Mike’s online recruitment efforts.  They manage Formspring accounts, participate in live chats with prospective students, film campus events, create videos, connect with prospects on Facebook and NING, and they tweet. I feel like a proud mom.

The hope is that you’ll meet them in one space and then recognize them in another.  When high-schooler Suzie is chillin in the Class of 2015 Facebook group, I want her to feel comfortable.  Hopefully she’ll be more apt to engage because she’s been reading Gabbi and Dan’s blogs and now she sees them answering questions and starting conversations on Facebook.

With that thinking in mind, this academic year I made it a requirement of the SMC Bloggers to use twitter.  (It was “highly encouraged” in years prior.)   Now I know there’s plenty of talk out there that says students under 18 aren’t tweeting.  Yes, I read  The Chronicle article and I saw the results of Noel-Levitz E-Expectations survey.   So am I wasting their time?

Nope.

During the 2009-2010 school year on SMCBlogs the 9 bloggers who were tweeting were by far the most “popular” bloggers.  During the year their blogs received about 550 visits/month.  The non-tweeters?  Only about 230 visits/month.

The most active tweeters continue to see the highest traffic to their blogs.
Over the past month the 5 most active students on twitter received an average of 347.2 blog visits.

We can compare this to:
5 students who do not use twitter* received an average of 167.5 blog visits.
5 “less-active” twitter users received an average of 114.2 blog visits.

Of course, there are many more factors going into why these students are (or are not) seeing traffic to their blogs and I know that twitter usage is not the only one.  Yet, I don’t think you can fight these numbers.  The active tweeters have more traffic to their blogs.  Plain and simple.

I want to hear from you.  I think there is a lot to talk about here.

Should your student bloggers be tweeters too?

*The 5 students not using twitter are volunteer blogging and are not paid, thus are not required to use twitter.  The SMC Bloggers that are contracted and paid are required to tweet.