Managing an on-campus student organization while also tending to a full-time class load can be overwhelming. On top of planning community events, you also need to find creative ways to attract new members.
Social media marketing will help you grow your student organization organically without spending too much time or money. We’ve put together some of the best on-campus student organization marketing tips that will help students balance the workload of classes and club management more efficiently.
1. Share user-generated content
User-generated content is the most trustworthy type of content, per Tint’s 2023 State of Social and User-Generated Content Report. When people trust your content (and ultimately your brand), they’re more likely to engage with you and eventually become a part of your organization.
Chances are your club members are already sharing videos and images at your events on social media. All you need to do is streamline the process.
Create a hashtag that students can add to their UGC content. This allows anyone to search, find and organize all the UGC related to your organization. You can repost the content or use a social media aggregator to pull it to a central place. We’ll delve further into this in the next section.
You can encourage club members to share UGC through contests. For example, you could ask them to submit pictures of themselves and their friends getting involved with an activity that is important to your organization for a chance to win a prize. The prize doesn’t have to be anything too flashy; usually, an Amazon gift card can go a long way toward motivating students to participate.
2. Aggregate social media content
There are a number of social media aggregator tools that will automatically pull all the social media posts from various social media networks and populate them in one beautiful social media feed. This way, your club can have a singular place prospective students can easily view all of the social media posts from your student organization. There are many free social media aggregator tools to choose from, so you don’t have to harm your organization’s budget to access these wonderful resources.
Social media aggregators aren’t just for collecting social posts from your student organization. These can also be helpful tools for following other student organizations to learn how they are marketing on social media, identify opportunities to partner with other clubs, or stay up-to-date on campus happenings. The better understanding you have of other student clubs and trends on campus, the better equipped your organization will be to succeed.
3. Use social media automation for marketing
Automation saves the time you would have otherwise spent handling social media marketing from scratch.
Use tools like Zapier and IFTTT to set up automation for:
- Posting content to all your social media accounts simultaneously.
- Updating media across all your accounts at the same time
- Archiving any social media posts or comments to your organization’s account in a document for reference and following up with any questions students ask.
- Automatically saving any images from your social media posts in an easily accessible location such as a Google Drive folder.
- Collect the information from any email receipts for the organization in a spreadsheet.
- Calendar notifications to silence your phone when you start a club meeting to prevent distraction and disruption.
4. Advertise on social media
Social media ads are significantly cheaper than traditional advertising. For example, Facebook advertising costs, on average, $0.94 per click. On the other hand, placing an ad on a digital billboard can cost over $15,000 per month.
Social media advertising is also much easier to track and measure success compared to more traditional forms of advertising and marketing. Traditional advertising tactics — like billboards. fliers and participating in your school’s public broadcasting network — cannot provide you with valuable metrics such as student impressions, engagement, and conversions.
Each social media platform has a step-by-step guide for setting up ads. For example, here’s how advertising works on Instagram.
5. Organize social media events
Most social media platforms allow you to host and promote events for free. For example, you can host Twitter Spaces, go live on Instagram or organize LinkedIn webinars. The added advantage is you can record these events for club members to watch later if they cannot attend them live.
If you’re hosting a social media event, make sure you start promoting it on time to drum up attendance. Ask club members to repost the event details on their socials. If you can, do some offline promotions to attract more attendees.
Keep engaging with the members of your student organization
Attracting new members is only one piece of the puzzle. To grow your organization, you need to create opportunities for members of your organization to engage with each other. Here are some ideas:
- Host online and offline events regularly
- Send newsletter updates to club members
- Curate a social wall for your school or student community
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