#BU2019 Commencement: Social Media Recap

By Dave McDonald, Assistant Director of Social Media and Carol Duan, International Social Media Specialist.

Another year and another commencement has come and gone. Throughout the weekend, our Class of #BU2019 celebrated their accomplishments and flooded the streets of Comm. Ave in red robes as they practically strutted into a new chapter of their lives. The joy of our graduates was impossible to miss, especially on social, as we tastefully inundated our follower's social feeds with all kinds of content that had them tagging #ProudtoBU in their congratulatory posts to our newly minted alumni.

How did our team produce engaging content? Below is a list of some of our key social media initiatives for our 2019 commencement along with the results and impact:

Overall Trends in 2019:

Instagram leads the way:

• Instagram continues to be one of our fastest growing mediums on social. This year 37.7% of our commencement-related content came from Instagram, and 81.5% of our engagements.

Instagram Stories continue to grab our followers attention:

With the continued growth of Instagram stories, we relied on them heavily to inform our community about the various commencement activities happening throughout the week. In total, we had 12 stories with a commencement twist.

Types of content included:

• Two Instagram Takeovers
• “Hey BU” Briefing with a Commencement twist
• Commencement FAQ
• Commencement Themed Trivia
• User-Generated Content
• Grad Cap Decorating contest

Snapchat took a back seat:

This year Snapchat took a back seat in our commencement efforts. With a continued decrease in engagement, we hosted only one Snapchat takeover this year. However, externally, our Snapchat geo-filters were highly engaged and served as a great touch point for our followers/attendees of our graduation events. In total 1,650 unique followers used both our Commencement and Senior Breakfast Snapchat geo-filters.

Embrace Mother Nature’s curve balls:

It was a rainy start to the ceremony, but it made for great social content. Some of our most highly engaged content were posts commenting on the rainy weather, it’s drastic turn to a sunny day, and the iconic ponchos our grads wore walking into Nickerson field. The lesson here: Cash-in on the day’s ambiguity and real-time content wins the day.

Social specific videos still rule:

A majority of our top videos throughout the month were social videos (i.e. videos that are under 60 seconds, viewable without sound). One thing that has changed however is that the videos no longer necessarily need to have a square ratio to be successful, a great example of this is the sights and sounds video. This is due to social media algorithm changes over time.

User-generated content charms our followers:

User-generated content (UGC) continues to work well for our audiences on both the main and Chinese social channels. Our followers love to see their “name in lights” by having their content featured on our social feeds. Throughout the week we relied on UGC to gain an inside look at what our Terriers were up to in between the various convocation events happening across our campuses. Our use of Tagboard on Nickerson field also helped with this effort, encouraging our students, parents, and friends to share posts in the moment. UGC is here to stay.

Takeovers:

Senior Breakfast Takeover

• We kicked off our Commencement content with our Senior Breakfast event, which honors the strides our senior class has made during their four years at Boston University. Lexi Herosian (COM’19), a public relations intern, took over our Instagram for the inside scoop of the event. Her takeover also included a special “Flash briefing” announcing our Commencement Speakers.

Commencement Takeover

• To give commencement a more personalized touch, we had one of our public relations interns takeover our Instagram account for an inside look at our Class of 2019’s big day on Nickerson Field. The takeover included close-ups of the commencement speakers, highlights from speakers, student interviews and more.

Grad Cap Contest:

Back by popular demand, our grad cap contest was a hit again this year. Using Instagram stories' poll feature, our followers voted on a series of grad caps, and round by round they slowly whittled down the submissions until the majority favorite won. In total, we had 24 grad cap submissions, but only 20 were picked for the contest. Designs were sourced via organic posts to our Instagram feed, Instagram stories, Facebook, and Twitter.

Tagboard:

What’s better than taking a photo? Taking photos for the world to see. For the third year in a row, we partnered with Tagboard to facilitate the sharing of students, parents, faculty, and staff social media posts throughout our #BU2019 Commencement ceremony. Like in year’s past our team had the ability to moderate the content and customize pace and display remotely. This content rotated in the time leading up to the start of the ceremony and was publicized on our main social media networks to encourage sharing. Our goal in using Tagboard was to make social media use a part of the Commencement experience and amplify user-generated content to enhance feelings of community and affinity for the University.

Chinese Social:

Replicating our traditional social media efforts on our Chinese social channels (Weibo and WeChat), we shared, repurposed and translated Commencement-themed content published on BU Today and our main social channels. The translated Commencement speaker Marcia McNutt’s speech received over 59k impressions and over 31k article views on Weibo.

By monitoring the online conversations on Weibo and WeChat, we identified a micro-influencer Junyu Chen in the Chinese community. During his four years at BU, Junyu “Jacky” Chen made himself a legend among his peers for offering advice about BU to incoming students from China. We successfully pitched this story to BU Today and translated this article on WeChat. The interview generated 4,000+ unique pageviews on BU Today. Within a week after it’s published, the translated article received 2,453 post views, 134 shares and 183 engagements on our WeChat channel. Bearing our audiences’ needs in mind, we also created a “How-to” guide on WeChat to help Chinese parents and guests navigate Commencement week.

The social stats from previous years have shown the power of video storytelling. This Commencement season, we published 14 videos on our Chinese social channels, including short videos we posted in Weibo Stories, an Instagram Stories-alike feature Weibo recently made available to verified brands. It’s our first year using Weibo Stories to send out real-time updates at Senior Breakfast and BU2019 Commencement. By sharing videos from our Stories as Weibo posts in feed, we created more authentic and snackable video content for our followers, which helped us improve engagements and post reach.

Leveraging user-generated content, we also used our Chinese social channels to promote Instagram Graduation Cap Contest, Snapchat Filters and Tagboard.

Facebook Live:

As we’ve done in year’s past, we live streamed the speech by NAS President, Marcia McNutt on Facebook. After the live stream ended we then boosted the post to increase its reach. When all was said and done, the video reached over 14,400+ users, had 5,600+ views, and just over 230 engagements.

Overall Results:

Overall, our performance of Commencement content on social media in 2019 was comparable to last year.

• We saw a 16.4% increase in commencement-related posts
• Total engagements increased by 5.5% in comparison to 2018
• The number of comments we received was 1.6% higher than last year, this indicates genuine engagement instead of a passive “like”.

What other ways have you seen Universities building and engaging with their communities around Commencement? Sound off in the comments.