It’s a little more than just “hanging out on Facebook” all day. UMW’s social media team has been busy expanding the university’s reach on social media one tweet, post and photo at a time. We’ve learned that despite having carefully curated content, sometimes all it takes is a picture of a squirrel to break the internet and a post with Dean Rucker will break records any day. Here’s a snapshot of our results for the 2014-15 academic year:
Twitter
We grew our Twitter presence by 18% this past year, increasing from 2,800 to 3,317 followers. We’re using #UMW and #MyMaryWash to talk about our university and staying in touch with our incoming Class of 2019 with #UMW19. We ended the year with 850 re-tweets, 977 favorites and 1,619 mentions. Check out some of our most popular tweets from the year:
Facebook
Despite a slight dip on our Facebook followers (we lost 537 when Facebook removed inactive accounts), we were still able to increase our total followers by 4%, from 18,534 to 19,352 followers. We reached an average of 74,671 people per month with a record number of 149,273 in April. And we engaged an average of 9,205 people per month with likes, comments, shares and clicks.
Instagram
We’ve seen the most success this year on Instagram with a 47% growth rate over the past academic year, from 1,255 to 1,842 followers. Photos of Dean Rucker and the fountain topped the charts for most liked photos and we ended the year with a total of 9,858 likes. Here’s the picture of the fountain that topped our records for most likes on a post this year:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is becoming even more relevant to us with its new YOUNIVERSITY platform for higher education. As in, Admissions and LinkedIn might soon be friends. This year, we created a team of content contributors from across campus to update the page and increased our followers from 18,226 to 20,119, a 10% growth rate. We’re still working on collecting the numbers on impressions.
YouTube
YouTube was our project for the semester as revamped and branded our account. Today we’re at 18,917 views and 54 subscribers and we’re excited to watch those numbers soar.
Statistics reflect data measured between September 2014 and April 2015.
