BU’s Social Media Growth: 2024 Wins and 2025 Experiments

By Dave McDonald, Director of Social Media

Happy 2025, Social Pros! As we gradually start remembering how to do our jobs again after a well-deserved holiday break, now is the perfect time to reflect and look forward. The PR | Social team at Boston University has much to smile about when we look back at 2024. To start, year-over-year, we saw a +66.20% increase in post shares, a +9.4% increase in followers, and our engagement rate jumped by +3.74%. These incredible numbers are due to our team’s strong reporting efforts, staying up-to-date with industry changes, and our willingness to experiment with new concepts. In 2024, some of our most successful content types included our person-on-the-street videos, zero-click content, point of view (POV) content with our “Excuse me, can you” concept, and more.

Before we get into the details, I would be remiss not to give a shoutout to my partners in crime: McKayla Richardson and Nicolas Rocca. Thank you for making BU’s flagship channels sing!

Let’s examine the concepts that worked in 2024 and what we plan to experiment with in 2025.

Content that rose to the top in 2024:

Top-performer: Person-on-the-street:

Person-on-the-street videos were everywhere in 2024, and viewers can’t get enough of them. The “in-the-moment” answers these videos provide give off a particular type of authenticity that people crave. Here at BU, these two specific themes that fall under the person-on-the-street umbrella rose to the top:

Theme #1: Game Show Concept:

Using one of our student workers as a host, we would use a “game show” concept to test our student’s knowledge of Boston University, whether it be about the University’s history, our never-ending list of successful alumni, or have them rank their favorite places to eat on campus. Check out this example:

Shoutout to our rockstar intern, Gavin Cheng, for making these videos a reality.

Theme #2: Personal and Heartfelt

Content that pulls in the heartstrings will always be a win. During our content planning meetings, we continuously note holidays like World Smile Day, World Kindness Day, Valentine’s Day, and more as opportunities to give our followers that warm and fuzzy feeling in their hearts. Unlike the “game show-style” concept, the carrot for these videos is usually the answer to the question the interviewer is asking or the action we ask the person to take, for example: “Can you give this person a compliment?”

Why these concepts work: These videos work due to a few essential factors, all of which play a significant factor in giving your content an algorithm boost:

• A great hook: A great video is nothing without a hook. In these concepts, in the first few seconds of watching, the “host” will typically offer a reward for watching the video in full, whether it be the answers to the game or the response they are trying to get from the person you’re interviewing.
• Retention: A great hook leads to better video retention, which leads to more views, but it doesn’t stop there. You’ll also need to get quality responses and ensure tight film cuts. In the examples above, you’ll notice that the quick cuts and text on-screen all contribute to viewer retention.
• They encourage commenting: Another big algorithm booster, these videos typically attract many comments from viewers announcing whether they answered the question correctly or offering their opinion on the interviewee’s answer.

Side Note: The person-on-the-street concept is reaching the point of exhaustion. With this in mind, any creative spin you can put on it in 2025 will likely benefit your engagement.

Top performer: “Excuse me, can you show me…”:

I mentioned this in a previous blog post, but I think it’s worth noting again. For this concept, we took a page from popular realtor Instagram and TikTok creators that will “walk up to strangers” in cities and have them tour their apartments to showcase what living in a specific city’s neighborhood is like. We used this concept for dorm tours. — While these videos are staged, the success of this video reinforces the idea that personable, raw “phone-in-had” style videos continue to rise to the top, and the “excuse me” intro provides an authentic hook and gets straight to the point of the video.

Top performer: Zero-click

Just because social platforms no longer prioritize clicks off-platform doesn’t mean sharing long-form articles is off-limits. This is where zero-click content comes into play — the perfect way to showcase your articles in a digestible and sharable format. For background, zero-click content is insightful or engaging content without the need to click anywhere to get the information. On social media, this can take many forms; however, it typically appears in the form of carousels, infographics, and sometimes videos.

In the example below, we took an article from BU Today, the University’s news publication, about where students can receive student discounts and dropped it into an engaging Instagram carousel. The post went gangbusters, earning 1.8K+ saves and 1K+ shares. So, the next time you’re asked to share an article, consider turning it into a zero-click post for your channels before pushing it out on social. Your followers (and the algorithm) will thank you for it.

Top performer: Hopping on Trends (within reason):

As I noted in my predictions piece for 2025, any organization caught up in chasing trends for quick-hit engagement risks diluting its brand identity. However, when a brand finds a trend that fits perfectly with what makes it unique, those are the moments to make your move. In 2024, this opportunity came with a craze around the Wicked movie, where we used the iconic “What is this feeling” song to create a split-screen collaboration video with Boston College, our biggest rival, to highlight our loathing for each other. Like the movie, our little collaboration was a huge hit. In 2025, we will continue to look for more opportunities like this thoughtfully.

Shoutout to Zanna Ollove at Boston College for helping to make this collaboration happen! 👏

Top-performer: LinkedIn Newsletters:

LinkedIn Newsletters are seriously overlooked. Not only are they a great way to feature your organization’s thought leadership, but they are also a great way to extend your reach and directly engage with your audience. Each newsletter you create on the platforms has its subscriber base, which means every time you publish a new edition, your subscribers get both a notification in the platform and the latest post also gets sent to your subscriber’s email, keeping them informed and engaged. — Shoutout to the subscribers of this newsletter! — In 2024, our “Connecting With” newsletter, highlighting the faculty and staff that make Boston University tick, continued its rapid growth, growing to an impressive 97K+ subscriber base. In the coming year, we expect this upward momentum to continue.

How we’re experimenting in 2025:

Research Explainer Videos:

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, many young people are now getting their news and information from short-form video apps like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. In light of this trend, our team has started pushing out video explainers to present groundbreaking research from the University in a more accessible way. In our initial pilot videos, we feature a student in a pink lab coat who explains complex diseases, such as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), and promising breakthroughs in blood pressure monitoring. So far, the results have been encouraging, with our first few videos accumulating 200K+ views across our channels. We started to dabble into this in late 2024, and in 2025, we plan to continue experimenting and refining it.

A big shoutout to our Boston University Productions partners, including Devin Hahn, Natalie Lett, and Alan Wong, for making this vision a reality.

Fly on the wall content:

How often have you heard someone say, “I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that conversation”? In 2025, we plan to experiment with this idea in our videos. We will capture moments like students giving away swag to the BU community and recording their reactions and conversations between professors and students during office hours. This approach could be an effective way to showcase more authentic interactions within our community. Fingers crossed that this concept is a success! Stay tuned for our first pilot.

Walk with me and talk about your passions:

This one falls under the “person-on-the-street” umbrella but with a twist. In this concept, our interviewer is taking an action with someone as they talk about something they’re passionate about. Whether walking down the street or joining someone for part of a workout, this brings authenticity and curiosity in a way different from just another talking head. The example below is our pilot concept from the fall semester, which featured a student discussing the University’s Food Rescue Program. The video earned modest engagement across our channels with 800+ likes, 33 comments, and 50 shares. — We’re looking forward to fine-tuning this concept in 2025.

Event Reminder Videos:

While this concept may not be groundbreaking, we tested it for BU’s annual Pumpkin Drop event hosted by the University’s physics department in 2024. It was a smash hit (sorry!), reaching over 6.6M users and gaining 9k+ engagements, including 1.7K+ shares and 900+ saves. Previously, we typically stuck to static images for our event reminders. Still, by using engaging broll (we used video footage from the previous year’s event), a good hook, and a strong call to action, we could give our promotional efforts the algorithm boost needed to reach the audience we wanted to attract.

That’s all I have for now. Keep an eye on Boston University’s social media pages in 2025, and let me know what you think of any new concepts you see! I’d love to hear from you. 😄

Until next time, Social Pros. 👋

-Dave