Marketing GivePulse to Students on Social Media - GivePulse Blog

Social Media Marketing: Overview

Social Media marketing provides an efficient and effective way to get your message out there and increase engagement. We know many students use social platforms to stay up to date with their friends, family, and organizations of interest, making a campus social media presence very important.

General Tips:

• When sharing links, use a URL shortener like bit.ly for a cleaner look
• Like, comment, and share student posts when they mention their community engagement efforts.
• 85% of users watch videos with the sound off, so make sure you turn on captions for video content.
• Create a hashtag for marketing GivePulse that’s specific to your campus – this will allow you to track student engagement.

Hashtags:

Hashtags help drive folks to your social channels. Create hashtags like #GivePulseServes, but tailor them to promote your institution. If your campus has a go-to hashtag already, be sure to add that in, as well.

Video Content 101

Why Video Content Matters

Despite the ever-developing nature of video marketing on social media, one fact remains true: engagement with videos on social media is unmatched. The best kind of content is evergreen so work to create and broadcast social content that you can recycle and edit for later use. For example, take pieces of a promotional video or social media takeover and use them in future how-to videos.

Work with Student Volunteers 

Ask students to take videos throughout their volunteer experience for social media. They can include these when they log an impact on GivePulse. Allowing students to document their experience on your campus’ social channels (social media takeovers) is another great way to obtain engaging and reusable content. Be sure to ask them to save their videos!

Engage Students through Video Campaigns 

Launch a social media campaign to capture evergreen, reusable video content from the get-go. For example, during Virtual Volunteer week, ask students to post “Why I volunteer” on their Instagram story, and have them tag your campus. Save these in a content folder on your computer for later promotional use. 

Instagram

Use Instagram to share eye-catching images and videos as static posts and Instagram stories. You can even film something live for your followers to watch in real-time, or share pre-recorded short videos (reels) and long videos on IGTV.

Pro Tips:

• Post hashtags in a comment to avoid visual clutter
• Tag your location and relevant accounts to increase engagement
• Instagram doesn’t support links in text. To work around that, set up a linktree and note “Link in Bio” at the end of each caption.
• Repost your static posts to your story for increased visibility

Facebook

With over 1 billion daily active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform. Like Instagram, Facebook is highly visual and allows you to upload pictures and videos to pair with your captions.

Pro Tips:

• Use high-quality photos to stand out within student news feeds
• If you don’t have a photo to share, make sure the content is interactive by asking a question, creating a poll, or creating a call to action
• Social media should be fun, so stick to your institution’s branding, but don’t be afraid to get creative and playful
• Post videos of student engagement on static posts, as well as Facebook Live

Twitter

Twitter is great for engaging with followers and sharing updates. Twitter is known for being a largely text-based platform, but it’s not uncommon to share pictures and videos alongside your tweets.

Pro Tips:

• Tweets cannot be over 280 characters long
• Tweets that contain hashtags receive 2x more engagement than those that don’t, but keep them to a minimum
• Tweets with images receive 89% more favorites
• Interactive tweets perform best, so whenever possible, ask a question or a use a call to action in your tweets
• Tag other twitter accounts when possible & relevant for increased visibility

Monthly Social Messaging Ideas

We hope these tips and ideas were helpful in guiding your GivePulse social media marketing efforts. For further information, check out our guide for marketing to students on campus, where we dive into specific tips for incentivizing registration and volunteerism amongst students.