“12 Days of SLAM”
The administrative director and I came up with the campaign “12 days of SLAM” to count down the days leading up to the fall SLAM - an event in which students in Capstone showcase their final projects and network with professionals in the industry. The goal of this campaign was to spotlight the different projects, spread awareness about the event, and encourage alumni to attend. Below are the specific social media graphics we would use on Facebook versus Instagram, as well as the strategy document.
Facebook strategy.
For Facebook, we created graphics that counted down to SLAM and uploaded them as our page’s profile picture. These graphics can be seen in the slideshow below. Along with changing the graphics each day to reveal “x” about of days until SLAM, I also tagged alumni and industry professionals in the caption of the image to encourage them to engage with the content and attend the event.
Results.
Overall, the countdown to SLAM on Facebook was a success! We saw overall around 20% increased engagement from users and 50% increase engagement from NMI alumni.
See images of the results below!
Graphics.
The graphics were a success! Compared to simple (“traditional”) Facebook posts that we did previously in years past, our audience engaged almost 20% more with the graphics we used as profile pictures.
Tagging alumni.
Tagging alumni in the caption proved to be tricky. If we tagged them in the caption of the graphic, there was little engagement with those that were tagged. There was also concern with users being notified like they would with a comment. So, we decided to try tagging alumni in the comments instead - and it was a success! We saw more than 90% increase in engagement when we switched from tagging in the description to when we commented tags, and around 50% increase for previous years’ engagement efforts with alumni.
Tagging Alumni Examples.
Instagram strategy.
For instagram, we posted a graphic each day and played off the jingle “12 days of Christmas”, changing it to “12 days of SLAM”. We posted a photo of a capstone team and their product each day and made slight changes to the jingle, which you can see in the slideshow below.
Results.
Overall, the Instagram campaign was a success! Our audience really enjoyed the play we made on the jingle. We found less engagement on Instagram than we did on Facebook, and believe if we implement some elements of the Facebook strategy to Instagram, we’d find more success.
Graphic Use.
Instead of using graphics like we used for the Facebook profile pictures, we used photos of each group’s team and their product’s logo. We found because of this, we didn’t see an increase in engagement from previous years, because unless the user read the caption, they didn’t realize there was a different campaign involving the “12 days of SLAM”. There was more engagement on the Facebook graphics, and we determine if we used a graphic similar to Facebook on Instagram, we’d see higher engagement.
Increased Engagement.
We did see a 15% engagement increase from our usual postings, including content leading up to SLAM in previous years. We didn’t tag alumni in our comments like we did on Facebook, and believe that may help with engagement if we do so in following years.
