Great Social Media Idea: Finals Week Encouragement

Howdy #hesm peeps! It's finals week at many colleges, so I thought it would be fun to share this really cute idea from Flagler College, in which they solicited words of encouragement for students on their Facebook page, then quickly produced a video showing the Flagler social media team printing off the comments and taping them up around the library.

Here's the original post asking for comments:

Post by Flagler College.

And here's the video, which was posted later on the same day:

Post by Flagler College.

I always love it when a social media project can go from online to offline, and I particularly love it when you can actually show people that their engagement on social media leads to real, tangible results for students.

And check it out... the same day I posted this story, the lovely people at Flagler sent in this note about this project:

“At Flagler College, we snapped some photos of an empty campus and students huddled together in the library studying for finals. Parents, friends and alumni flooded our post with encouraging words for students to “keep going,” and “hang in there.” We decided to print out the encouragements from our Facebook post and tape them around the library where students would be sure to see them. Of course, we made a video about it and reposted that to Facebook as well. This worked great! We engaged the Facebook community, showed our students that people are rooting for them, then re-engaged our Facebook community again as they saw their comments posted all around the library. Needless to say, we had great insights on social media that day.”

Just think about how good it would feel if you were a Flagler alum who took the time to write a comment on the FB page, and then you see later that day that your note ended up getting posted somewhere in the library for all sorts of students to see and take encouragement from.

I'm always harping on about how social media posts should make your followers feel something, and I think this is a terrific example of taking an idea that has been done plenty of times - crowdsourcing words of advice and support - and putting that extra effort in to make something go from "Monday's post on FB" to really terrific and inspirational social media project.

Job well done, Flagler!