Other Social Media Channels

While Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr make up the most popular social media sites, they are by no means the only channels Albion College uses.

As a department, we watch for upcoming social platforms, and join them when appropriate. Often, we will join them if only to register our “albioncollege” username. Then, as the site gains users, we have a foot in the platform’s door.

Here’s how we manage some of the other social media sites around the Web.

Instagram

Albion’s Instagram account is an in-the-moment way to share photos of students and campus events, as well as campus beauty shots. Most College locations are also available when geotagging photos. If a student or alumni appears in the Instagram photo, we tag them as well.

We usually automatically follow anyone on Instagram who follows the college. Also, whenever someone tags the College (using either the @albioncollege username or #albioncollege hashtag), we try to like and comment on the photo.

The College should post a photo to Instagram at least weekly, and more during events.

Instagram allows you to share photos on Twitter and Facebook. For efficiency, we post photos to Twitter every time, but for Facebook we reserve Instagram photos for big events or slow social media days.

A few tips: no food shots, and no blurry shots. Behind-the-scenes photos perform particularly well. Campus beauty shots are universally appealing.

Pinterest

While Pinterest’s target audience and usage (female, fashion, fitness, and food) do not automatically match up with Albion’s, we use the social pinboard site to share visual content and show the quirky side of Albion’s personality.

We generate pins with mostly student-created content, including fun decorations, campus beauty shots, and celebration stories. We also recruit others to pin to our boards when they see content that fits.

Typically, we will post new pins to our boards once or twice a week until we settle on a long-term strategy for the site. As of now, Boards include:

• #instaBrits: student-, staff- and alumni-created Instagram photos
• Albion Around Town: Albion gear spotted in random locations
• Albion Gear: clothing, swag, etc.
• Purple and Gold Decor: Decorations, Albion-related decorations, purple and gold decorations
• Squirrels!: Random photos of squirrels
• Brit’s Wardrobe: Armor, shields, swords, pics of Brit
• Albion Through the Years: Classic photos of Albion
• Around Campus: Campus shots, both student-created and official

We are now experimenting with a more story-telling approach, using #askalbion as a way for students to give advice to prospective students.

Google+

Albion College maintains an account on Google+ for the simple reason that, as G+ grows, we need to be ready to launch with a viable strategy.

But for now, we simply occupy space on what could turn out to be a popular platform. Also, it helps with organizing College information (business name, contact information, Google Search ranking, etc.) through Google.

We make weekly updates focusing on major themes and events taking place at the College, and tend to share mostly YouTube videos that outline these themes.

Because there’s no easy way to find out who is adding the College’s page to their circles, we tend to pick people we know (students, alumni, etc.) to add to the page’s circles, and post updates publicly.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a location-based check-in platform that lets users share where they are, earn badges for checking in to places, and posting photos and tips for the location. Albion’s presence on Foursquare is mainly to set up the check-in locations around campus. We offer tips for each location (The Rock: Paint it every day (but not more than that!)), and assign proper names for locations.

Usage is low on campus, but with the Colleges’ Foursquare account we can set up the parameters for users to check-in.

Vimeo

Albion maintains a presence on Vimeo to (a) display automatically-high quality embeddable videos, (b) offer the option to download videos, and (c) offer an non-athletic-videos alternative to YouTube. Many of the more long-term, high-quality videos get posted to Vimeo.

Other Social Media Platforms

Albion will join other social media sites as they emerge, if needed, often to simply secure the College’s username (@albioncollege). Criteria for joining new social media platforms include:

• Size of audience (the “network effect”)
• Number of alumni/students/parents that are members
• Unique offering of the platform
• Long-term viability of the platform
• Long-term strategic opportunities

Find Albion social media accounts on our Social Media Listing