4. Add your institution’s own spin

[fomayof928@mowline]

BGSU has leveraged a student social media intern team for years, but in 2023, they launched a brand ambassador program for student micro influencers. The students post on their personal social media channels weekly, but also have the opportunity to learn, brainstorm and create TikToks with the BGSU social team in-person twice a month.

“Having an extra layer of connection with students has tremendously croatia b2b leads helped us stay in touch with what’s happening on campus and hear new ideas and perspectives from a variety of students—we get amazing TikTok and campaigns ideas from them. It’s also a great learning opportunity for students interested in marketing or public relations,” she says.

Holbrook and Colant recommend identifying ways you can connect popular content to your institution whether it’s a TikTok trend or sound.

“We try to see how we can blend OU into the TikTok space in a way that’s engaging and fun, but also informational for the audience we’re trying to reach,” Colant says.

For example, the team created several videos during the Barbie movie parody trend, like this one below:

A TikTok video by Ohio University featuring students participating in a Barbie movie parody trend.

But our social practitioners agree that there’s an art to hopping on trends. Blackburn mentions how they participated in the “I’m X, of course of XYZ” trend on TikTok.

Blackburn explains the “I’m X, of course,” trend was successful because they were able to post when it was first becoming popular on TikTok. Instead of making it just about BGSU students, they made the video about all college students, which captured a much broader audience. She advises teams to act fast when hopping on trends and create content that is relatable to a broad audience.