#BU2021 Commencement: Social Media Recap
By Dave McDonald, Assistant Director of Social Media
After a year of hybrid learning, COVID-19 protocols, and social distancing, Commencement 2021 was a welcome celebration and finish line to a stressful academic year. As CDC guidelines eased, our class of 2021 was able to come together to celebrate their accomplishments and take their first steps into the next chapter of their lives as BU Alumni. However, with masks still required and viewers tuning in virtually, things looked a little different from previous years. Here’s a rundown of how the BU Social Media team tackled Commencement 2021.
Overall Trends in 2021:
Instagram continues to lead the way:
Year after year, Instagram continues to produce the most engagements over any of our other social platforms. This year, 33.3% of our Commencement-related content came from Instagram, and 56.8% of our overall engagements.
Instagram Stories and headline-first posts were top performers:
In July 2020, we revamped our Instagram strategy taking on a more informative approach. This includes highlighting more campus news stories, research, and explainer carousels for important campus announcements. With news and COVID restrictions changing rapidly this year, this approach proved to be effective for our Commencement-related content on Instagram as well. We used Sprinklr’s Shoppable Store (similar to a Linktree) feature to drive people to articles where they could receive additional information.
As we have in past years, we tapped the shoulder of one of our student interns to take over our Instagram for the day and give our followers an inside look at the day’s lineup of events. The takeover featured everything from close-ups of the Commencement speakers to behind-the-scenes shots and boomerangs with students.
Twitter Quote Cards Posted in Real Time:
Quote cards posted in real-time continue to be a successful event strategy. By creating inviting graphics, highlighting impactful quotes, and tagging speakers in our posts, we were able to achieve high engagement, especially if the speaker retweeted the image. This year, we were lucky to have two Commencement speakers that have been making headlines this year: Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley and Dr. Noubar Afeyan, founder of Moderna.
Tagboard went from an added bonus to an essential piece of the puzzle:
With guests not allowed on the field because of COVID-19, we had to get creative on how we could incorporate them into the event. Along with a live stream of the event, we once again partnered with Tagboard to facilitate the sharing of students’, parents’, faculty’s, and staff’s social media posts throughout our #BU2021 Commencement ceremony. This year especially, we encouraged loved ones to share their congratulatory messages on social media using #BU2021, and we used Tagboard to push those messages onto the jumbotron for graduates to see.
Grad Cap Contest:
Nothing like the chance to win a BU sweatshirt to help get the creative juices flowing. Using Instagram Stories, our followers voted on a series of grad caps, and round by round they slowly whittled down the submissions until the majority favorite won. Designs were sourced via callouts on Instagram stories ahead of time.
Here’s the winning design!
Commencement Celebration Page:
While most of the Class of 2021 was celebrating Commencement in-person, due to BU’s hybrid learning model this year, many of our Terriers were also graduating virtually. With this in mind, we created a Celebrate page on our Commencement Website to help immerse our graduates into the graduation experience with a series of digital goodies. These assets also helped family and friends celebrate from afar as well. We offered a variety of Zoom backgrounds, Instagram face filters, TikTok backgrounds, a Spotify playlist, and more.
Summary of results:
Overall, Commencement content performance on social media in 2021 was more robust than in previous years.
- 110.9K engagements across our channels, compared to 162.7K engagements in 2019.
- 3.1K post shares, compared to 1.3K in 2019
- 19M+ in reach, compared to 13.6M in 2019.
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What other ways have you seen universities building and engaging with their communities around Commencement? Sound off in the comments.
