BU Today, the news website of Boston University, wanted to deepen and expand its relationship with student readers. The daily BU Today newsletter that goes out to all students, staff, and faculty was not resonating with our student audiences. We decided that to address increasing our student readership, we had to reach them where they consume content, and acknowledge that an email newsletter may not be their preferred channel. We developed a solution that involves curating content for students, and delivering it to them on their preferred platform in a more playful, conversational voice, and with a tone that speaks to them. We call it Hey BU. Working with our internal creative agency, we developed the series name and gave it unique branding. We selected Instagram Stories for our distribution model. Why Instagram? Boston University’s Instagram feed is our fastest growing social media channel, and its demographics skew younger. Furthermore, the Instagram Stories feature allows Boston University to link to BU Today stories. This way we could use Instagram Stories to reach students on their preferred social channel, generate awareness for stories that are relevant to them, and drive readers to BU Today, thus increasing traffic to the website.
From the Judges
Great use of Instagram and IG Stories to promote stories already on the website and in the email newsletter. They targeted their audience with conversational language and tone. Their analytics proved their efforts worthy. Great job to listen to the audience and continue to create content that they saw was resonating the most with them. Good job focusing on more content that creates the most swipe-ups, and that you did it all in-house. The posts were attractive and the presentation was well organized.
