University of Michigan Social Media

Instagram 101: The Basics

(Photo courtesy of @hugh_davio)

Since we joined Instagram in April, we’ve been enjoying sharing our favorite photos from around Ann Arbor and celebrating campus life, as well as sharing many photos taken by our community of students, alumni, and Wolverines around the globe.

Our team in the #UMSocial office got together to discuss our favorite parts about Instagram, and best practices for those looking to build their presence. Instagram is one of our favorite platforms, as it is rapidly growing and never short of visual content.

"As homecoming week continues, this is a great week to reflect, we want to know what does #ForeverGoBlue mean to this week’s @UmichStudents?"

@UMForeverGoBlue

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ON THE GRID: Making the student voice visual

I’ve been toying for MONTHS about the best way to get great U-M photos all collected in one place. I tried using the #UMInstagram hashtag (which is still kinda cool, but I hadn’t truly found a good use for it).

Storify is cool, but it’s just not as powerful as I want it to be.

And then today it hit me: The @umichstudents media grid.

It couldn’t be a more perfect visual representation of student life at Michigan. It’s photos taken BY STUDENTS, and they’re all in these beautiful Instagram squares, which is just perfect.

To be honest, I haven’t figured out all the ways to leverage this yet, but I did update the background of the @umichstudents page, and I think it looks pretty cool. What’s a better way to show a day in the life of our students than their own photos?

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@umichstudents: Trust In Your Students

Yesterday we launched our newest initiative: a Twitter feed for students, run by students. It’s called @umichstudents, and it came out of a brainstorm at Twitter HQ last week (no, we aren’t copying Sweden, but we’re certainly watching how they’re doing).

Every week we will have a different student tweeter, who will be responsible for managing the account in all ways, although I will have moderation and monitoring capabilities through Hootsuite. And there’s a high degree of trust. The rules are: no swearing, no illegal activity, and no promotion/selling. Very simple.

On day two, we already have 241 followers, and I hope it keeps growing at this rate. We hope to use it as a tool to help new students get advice from experienced students, as well as prospective students to get a feel for what it feels like to be a Michigan student.