Brain Waves Blog

So you want to increase your social media engagement? I’ve got a hot tip that will outlast any algorithm change, meme trend, or “when to post” advice.

One of the things I love about working in higher education is the collegiality (I didn’t even learn what that word meant until my first campus job). Although institutions compete for many of the same students, many professionals freely share knowledge, experience, mentorship, and lessons learned. Traditionally this was done in-person at conferences, and you’d be lucky to attend once a year. For the last decade, it’s been evolving—and I’m pleased that it’s evolved in favor of introverts.

February is a month of valentines, galentines, and if you’re in admissions, yieldentines! Yield is the stretch of time between students receiving their admissions decisions and choosing where they will deposit and, ultimately, enroll. While decision day on May 1 once signaled the end of yield, at many institutions this is no longer the case. Some students will deposit at multiple schools, and summer melt with ongoing offers is a new reality for many admissions teams.

It’s a hot July day in Florida when Bella—we won’t use her last name—uploads a 17-minute video to her YouTube page. Bella has uploaded one video per month since July 2018, but this video, a year later, is her first video since February. It’s a point she doesn’t hide from her 171 subscribers.

At the University of Central Florida (UCF) we learned through our standard social listening on Instagram that our students wanted campus-specific GIPHY stickers. The large number of direct messages and replies asking us to create GIPHY stickers led us to dedicate time and resources to our rather bland and useless GIPHY channel. While we technically had an account, we officially transitioned it to a brand channel. A few short months later, we released our first GIPHY sticker pack—of course flaunting UCF’s black and gold brand. And in just over nine months, our GIPHY channel grew from a whopping 104 views to more than 104 million views as of July 2019. That’s an average of 11.5 million views a month!

Collegiate athletic programs exist for a number of reasons; namely, they’re a huge revenue generator, taking advantage of conference-affiliated and national television broadcasting contracts and merchandising to market their teams and universities.