YouTube Live & Campus Tours
We’re working with our Undergraduate Admissions team on some engagement-expanding opportunities for both the yield season and general awareness about the University of New Hampshire. The #UNHSocial team created a dedicated YouTube channel for UNH Undergraduate Admissions in an effort to build an audience and attract prospective students, their parents, guidance counselors, and anyone else interested in learning more about UNH.
The social media team worked with the undergraduate admissions office, student interns, and campus tour guides to establish the new channel and test live-streaming by using YouTube Live. We determined that creating live video content and rebroadcasting it later was worth pursuing to attract new viewers, but also to help amplify authentic student content to future Wildcats. Gen Z say YouTube is the number one platform they turn to when they want to relax or cheer up and 85% of teens use YouTube, so providing content in this space was definitely the right decision.
Initially, we wanted to move our live tours of campus from Instagram to YouTube, however, the platform changed its rules to only allow live videos on desktop until your page reaches 1,000 subscribers, then going live via mobile is an option for live-streaming. Because we just started this new channel only three weeks ago, we only have 185 subscribers right now, which means that goin live via mobile will have to wait, …or would it?
After some research, we discovered a way to perform live campus tours via mobile on YouTube without the necessary 1,000 subscribers. We did this by going live through the Zoom mobile app and then making the student tour guide full screen with other students present to help answer questions and assist with any technical issues or concerns. This entire effort has helped amplify UNH and our recruitment efforts on YouTube, the leading social media video platform for teenagers.
In addition to live tours, we also created a new weekly YouTube Live Q&A series hosted by students with special guests to create even more original content and to help amplify important information about UNH. So far, we’ve done three live sessions — the first was a pilot, but the next two were very successful with more viewers, more discussion, and more sharing.
NOTE: We did have a small budget to advertise the upcoming YouTube Live Q&A series to a targeted audience, which helped us increase viewership, subscribers, and the overall reach.
Lastly, we have a 3-year old student takeover series called #ThisIsUNH and we’ve begun sharing these on the YouTube page to expand reach and awareness. After the student completes the takeover on Instagram, we edit the video and upload to a playlist on the YouTube channel. By sharing this content on another platform, we can expose authentic student content to more people, extending our reach in the most appropriate communities.
Written by Jason Boucher, #UNHSocial Captain
