By: Kayla Cullum Michael, MA
Howdy from a millennial! Is that cheugy of me to say? Anyways, not here to talk vernacular of different generations. I’m the resident social media gal over at Johns Hopkins University Office of Pre-Professional Programs and Advising. Not a job that was assigned to me, but a role I happily added to my “other duties as assigned” because I genuinely believe in the power that social media plays to serve our students in a positive way.
Have you ever said to yourself:
“I’m too old to do social media!”
“I don’t think my students would pay attention to us online.”
“I don’t even know how to make a TikTok?”
“It’s always changing and I’m just overwhelmed on where to even start.”
If you answered “yes” to one, or more, of the above sentences, then hopefully this post will start to change your perception of social media and how you can use it to supplement your advising.
The arrival of Gen Z and eventually Gen Alpha at our institutions, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and the immersion of online learning, has caused many colleges and universities to come up with creative ways to “meet our students where they are” instead of trying to make them come to us. Gone are the days of students checking a website for updates or pictures of events. Now they are searching for you on Instagram or TikTok to see what you are up to and hoping to find the most direct version of the information they are looking for.
I know in my personal life, I am using Instagram for most of my daily thoughts or questions. For example, I had a restaurant.com gift card for a pizza place about 20 minutes from me. Their website was overflowing with mouthwatering pictures of pizza, super easy to navigate, and allowed me to place on online order with 10 minutes. Cool-order placed. Went to google maps and started 🎵 making my way downtown 🎵. I thought, let me just check Instagram to see what is happening at this place. Found a post that said they are closing for the next 3 months…. WHAT! Why was that nowhere on their website and why was I still able to place my order?! Queue the panic emails and direct messages on Instagram to try and get my money back. Lesson learned: check a business’s Instagram before purchasing.
It’s not question our students spend their time on social media. More than half of Gen Z spend four or more hours a day on social media (Roberts, 2023). We know the online algorithms and all the devices listening to us at home (Hey, Jeff Bezos!) push creative, fun, and subject relevant content into our hands all day long (Brady, 2023). So why shouldn’t we be the content that is being pushed towards our students?
It gives us the opportunity to give university specific information to our students (such as our committee processes) and educate incoming students about potential opportunities they may have at their new home, maybe even swaying them to come to your campus. We want our students to get the correct information from us rather than other pre-health influencers, SDN, or Reddit.
Want to take a stab at it?
First step is making an account on the platform you want to dabble in. Don’t feel like you need to make all the accounts at once! Experiment with one platform and create another when you feel ready. It’s easy to sign up with any email address (I recommend using your office’s general email address, so your account is not hooked to one specific person) and it’s completely free.
After you take the leap of making an account, here are some further steps to consider taking:
Make a list of things you want to tell your students.
I have a running list of ideas to make into content. Some things include: ideas for gap year opportunities, how to make an advising appointment, deadlines for the relevant primary application cycles, what is a re-app vs. a first-time applicant, how to find clinical in Baltimore, upcoming workshops and events, etc. Things that seem very simple for us to understand are the best things to start making into content. Maybe even keep track of commonly asked questions in your advising appointments and consider addressing them through social media. It’s important to also jot down why you want to share this with them. That can help inform how and when you share this content in the future.
When should you tell them these things?
It might not make sense to post about personal statements in the beginning of the fall if we know most of our students are writing them in the spring semester. The relevancy of the content goes hand in hand with when you post it. When they complement each other, that is when you see engagement soar. For example, at the end of every spring semester Hopkins hosts a celebration for the freshmen declaring their majors. I attend this event and approach student Billy on the Street style to ask them their summer plans. I record random students on my phone telling me their plans, compile them all into a video, and post pretty much immediately. My first time making this video I had over 18,000 views. Students went wild, tagging their friends in the video and sharing it far and wide. I believe this video was so successful partly because it was a video about student’s summer plans within days of summer break, and the event being featured happened less than 3 hours earlier. Timing is everything.
Can you tell them these things in different ways?
Recycling content and ideas is the easiest way to look like you have a lot of things to say, but you are just reiterating the same things different ways. For example, I made a carousel post explaining the different types of interviews a student may encounter during their application process. This was just a quick post I made by putting together a few images that I made on Canva with the correct verbiage about the different interview types. I also could have made this into a video post by having myself and someone else in a zoom room portraying a 1:1 interview, and then a few people in a zoom room portraying an MMI, and then explain further in the post description. As we know, people retain information through different modes of communication so it’s important to think about how you can recycle your content and ideas for different types of learners.
How much time to do you have to make this content?
Social media very well could take up every hour of my week. Its overwhelming when you have so many ideas but not enough time to get them all out into the world. Start small. Set very attainable goals to get started. I think posting once a week at first would be a great start, and then increasing posts to increase your followers. Planning what I want to post and when also helps keep me accountable for making the content and posting it when needed. I also heavily utilize my student worker. This is the first year I advertised my student worker job strictly as someone who would do social media. She has been an amazing asset to our pages and helps bring an authentic student voice and vision to our brand.
Hopefully this brief list will give you the confidence to get started. If you are interested in learning more, please come find my session at the NAAHP National Conference this summer in Cincinnati. #happyposting
Sources:
Brady, W. (2023, August 23). Social media algorithms warp how people learn from each other, research shows. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/social-media-algorithms-warp-how-people-learn-from-each-other-research-shows-211172
Roberts, J. (2023, January 27). Gen Z’s social media usage in 2023: Later. Later Social Media Marketing. https://later.com/blog/gen-z-social-media-usage/
Kayla Cullum Michael, MA serves as one of the Assistant Directors of Pre-Professional Advising at the Johns Hopkins University. Kayla has a passion for guiding her students down the paths they truly desire to be on and using social media as an extension of her advising. Kayla is involved on several NEAAHP committees, and was a part of the inaugural class of NAAHP-Leads.
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