A blog for social media communicators at MIT

#ThisIsMIT

By Jenny Li Fowler September 6, 2017

It is well known that MIT students are academically exceptional and are high scholastic achievers. What is less known is how well-rounded, creative, and artistic they are. To showcase what students do outside of the classroom, I wanted to create a campaign to encourage them to produce videos for social sharing. This...

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How We Use Slack

By Jenny Li Fowler May 11, 2017

MIT has a very collaborative social media community centered around the Social Media Working Group (SMWG). The group is composed of staff who either directly manage a social media platform for an MIT department, lab or center, or manage a person who does. There are currently 150 members on the official list, but I...

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What You Need to Know About Social Media Analytics Tools

By Jenny Li Fowler September 21, 2016

I spent the better part of the summer researching social media tools that could help meet our needs for more comparative and targeted analytics, and after looking into dozens of platforms and viewing numerous demos here’s what I’ve learned: The majority of social media analytics tools fall into one of three categories...

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#MIT02139

By Jenny Li Fowler May 20, 2016

The Century in Cambridge celebration marked the 100th anniversary of MIT’s move from Boston to Cambridge in 1916, and events were planned for most of the spring. We wanted to share our festivities with the rest of the world, so we created the hashtag #MIT02139 (MIT + the campus’s zip code) to support the celebration...

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Building a Following on Snapchat

By Kellen Manning April 28, 2016

Due to Snapchat not providing definitive total audience numbers, this is not a definitive case study. It’s more or less, me trying something with my channel and providing conclusions. What do I know for sure? As of May 2015, the Division of Student Life’s Snapchat account (MIT Student Life) amassed over 1000...

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Periscope: What We've Learned So Far

By Stephanie Hatch Leishman, By Emer Garland July 30, 2015

We recently launched MIT on Periscope, which is a new social network for live video streaming. We have done a few scopes (shorthand for a Periscope video), so let us share our learnings with those of you who are also just getting started.  1. Periscope is super new, so experimentation with the platform is expected. ...

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MIT Commencement 2015

By Stephanie Hatch Leishman July 28, 2015

I took what I learned from the past few years and applied the learnings to our social media efforts for this year's Commencement week. We received great engagement on MIT's social channels.  The hashtag At MIT, we used the hashtag #MIT2015, which followed our usual pattern: MIT and the year of the graduating class. I...

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#alwaysMIT

By Stephanie Hatch Leishman June 30, 2015

In May, some members of MIT's Commencement committee wanted to gather memories from graduating seniors and asked me if we could use social media to do so. The original hashtag that was proposed was #MITmemories. It seemed like a straightforward choice, but “memory” was a word overused in alumni and graduation...

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Applying Youtility to Pinterest

By Esther Wallace April 16, 2015

A previous post by Stephanie Leishman and the overall discussion on Youtility inspired us at MIT Recreation to ask ourselves the question “How can our social media be more useful to our audience?”  What better place to start answering this question than with Pinterest, a platform designed for exploration and...

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Snapchat Case Study: Or, How We Learned to Love the Sticker

By Kellen Manning, By Joe Johnson March 31, 2015

Our goal as members of the Division of Student Life communications team is to show that MIT has a thriving, vibrant community full of activities and events, and to illustrate it in a way that is student engaged and student driven. Springfest is no exception. It is one of the biggest events hosted by the Undergraduate...

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