Great Social Media Idea: Incoming Class Infographic

If you've read this blog over the past month (many thanks to all five of you out there!), you might know that I've droned on and on and on about how people that follow colleges on social media loooooove all things freshmen. Freshmen in the morning, freshmen in the evening, freshmen at supper time! They love giving advice to them. They love learning about them. They love welcoming them with road signs. They just love them some freshmen, plain and simple.

Which is why this incoming class infographic from Johns Hopkins is such a great social media idea.  (I've seen a few other schools make these too, but Johns Hopkins was first on my newsfeed today, so bully for them!)

Oh, I totally could have gotten in to Johns Hopkins if I wanted. I just chose not to.

Infographics like this are a really fun way to showcase some impressive stats, do some obligatory marketing bragging, and instill some class pride into the new students. Potential data points for such an infographic include things like GPA, SAT, geographic diversity, ethnic diversity, majors declared, application numbers, etc. Lots of different ways you can go with something like this.

Also, props to Johns Hopkins to linking to a page where the infographic is actually readable. One of the challenges with posting infographics on Facebook is that, unless it's super simplistic, all the detail gets completely lost when Facebook compresses the image file. Another challenge is that when people design them super huge, they can be really awkward to read in your browser... I can't tell you how many times I've clicked a link to an infographic and it blows up so large that it is more trouble than it's worth to deal with. Johns Hopkins found a nice happy medium with the sizing and accessibility, and it really pays off. 

So call up your campus graphic designer, or if you don't have one of those (like me!), roll up your Illustrator sleeves and bust one of those puppies out!