Great Social Media Idea: Snow Pic Blog Post

Apparently it's weather week here on SMFC. Not sure if it will catch on the same way Shark Week has, but I've got high hopes.

I follow A LOT of colleges on social media, and today I saw A LOT of pictures of what was the first snow fall of the season at many colleges. Generally speaking, these posts are shooting fish in a barrel - people love them some snowy campus pics.

But one post that stood out to me was this one by Kenyon College, which collected a variety of user-generated pics from social media and otherwise and placed them all into an easily shareable and fun blog post.

Post by Kenyon College.

While the first inclination may be to simply post a Facebook photo gallery when doing something like this, that doesn't really allow for embedding Tweets and it's something that can be seen outside of Facebook and have a much longer shelf-life by living as a link on the front page of the website. (It's the top story right now.)

My former boss (now my boss's boss as the VP overseeing my division) reminds me sometimes that a lot of administrators, faculty, board members, etc. miss most of the things I do on social media. They are busy, they are in meetings all the time, they are older... they simply don't spend as much time on social media as a lot of other people do. Those type of people are much more likely to see something that is linked to from our website than something that is simply posted on Facebook.

With that in mind, this post from Kenyon is doubly effective - not only is it fun to scroll though, but it also is more likely to be seen by campus leaders, parents, etc. than it is if it existed solely on Facebook. And, of course, all the folks on Facebook will still see it - they just have to click a link rather than click through a gallery.

As our reach numbers continue to dwindle, I wonder if it will start making more and more sense to do things like creating a blog post with photos/videos you want to share and link to them rather than posting directly onto FB. That definitely won't make sense a lot of the time - maybe even most of the time - but it definitely works nicely for something like this.

Something to consider going forward, for sure. Thanks, Kenyon, and job well done!