In the past, the Campus Day tour guides would take group pictures of the incoming freshmen. Then, they would email the pics to the college’s communications & marketing team to be placed in a Facebook photo album where the freshmen were encouraged to go tag themselves.

This year the College of Engineering is using Instagram (IG) to take the social sharing aspect of Campus Tours to the next level. It’s known that IG is a great way to engage with a student demographic. In a nutshell, the tour guides post group shots to their IG account with #UmichEngin18. Then, the students with IG accounts often go and like the pics. It has been an awesome way for the College of Engineering to find out which freshmen are using IG and engage with them. It also exposes them to commonly used CoE hashtags. Finally, these pics can be easily curated in chunks via Statigram and added to a Facebook album.

Campus Tours have only been going for a couple months, but so far so good. This is just one example of how we’re trying to make social sharing part of the culture within the College of Engineering – starting with the first time students see campus.

This post was contributed by Ben Logan, Social Media Specialist, College of Engineering