Great Social Media Idea: Best Photos of the Year Countdown

If you think I'm NOT writing this blog post while listening to St. Elmo's Fire, well, you'd be wrong, my friends. I'm gonna be a man in motion!!!

Believe it or not, there are only 20 days left until we hit 2014. Gulp. And what's the most popular end-of-the-year content online around this time of the year? "Best of 2013" lists! Best movies, best songs, best pictures, best gifs, best moments, best blah blah blah... best everything. No doubt about it, this is rich territory to mine for us higher ed social media managers.

And wouldn't you know it, Brown University is already on it, in a really cool way!

I'm assuming they will be posting a photo a day between now and the end of the year, and when they're done they could easily package them all together in one piece on the website or blog or something like that. I really like the idea of rolling out the photos one at a time, not only because it can make the content last longer but it can be scheduled out to post over the holiday break, which is always a troublesome time for social media managers... everyone else is off work, but social media is still going 24/7, irrespective of Christmas.

Interestingly, this photo was crowd-sourced off of Instagram... not sure if they will be doing that for the whole promotion, but that's a cool way to promote both the Instagram page and to direct people to use the hashtags you want them too.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this campaign from Brown, and I'll very likely steal the idea in some way shape or form, because that's how I do. CASE stands for Copy and Steal Everything, right? Right!  ;)