During my Sophomore year at Berkeley, I had the opportunity to run the UC Berkeley facebook page. In the middle of massive UC budget cuts, I entered the position at a time when student frustration with the administration was skyrocketing. Students felt that the administration did not understand their needs and was not representing their interests. Furthermore, there were no clear channels of communication between students and the administration, augmenting the problem.
We decided to use the facebook page as a key avenue of communication between the administration and students. In addition distributing information to students, we also planned to use facebook as a method of feedback to help them voice their ideas to upper administration.
The key to the new strategy was aligning our daily posts with student interest, and speaking with the student voice. While posts like the one above deviate somewhat from a prototypical UC Berkeley post, they strongly align with what the students care about.
The most often a facebook user likes a post from the UC Berkeley page, the more likely it is that our posts will show up on that user's feed. By increasing comedy and aligning with our user base's interests, we greatly increased engagement among our followers.
We could use this increase in engagement to help create a channel of communication between students and the administration. This feedback makes the students feel heard, and gives the administration valuable insight into student opinion.
We could also use the increased engagement to boost participation in events that really mattered.
