Connecticut College became the first educational institution to publish custom-crafted marketing materials on BuzzFeed, a project I initiated as the College’s social media strategist. The decision experiment as a BuzzFeed Contributor (later, as a “Brand Publisher”) was two-fold: At the time, Facebook’s algorithm was prioritizing links from established publications like BuzzFeed and the New York Times, so it was clear that a buzzfeed.com link would perform better than a conncoll.edu one.

More importantly, creating marketing content on BuzzFeed allowed the College to speak to its audience in a different way, using a new tone. We could share content that may previously not have been formal enough for the .edu homepage, and we could create more compelling, visually exciting stories. The engagement scores for these posts speak for themselves: the College’s BuzzFeed content outperformed even the most interesting on-site content, resonating with the prospective, current student, alumni and parent constituencies.

Noteworthy selections

BuzzFeed: 8 Ways To Kick-Start Your Career From The Moment You Arrive At College

When Connecticut College was named by The Princeton Review as one of the top 20 best college for career preparation, we capitalized on the moment in the spotlight. As other staff worked on media releases and website content, I worked to quickly turn around a sponsored content-style BuzzFeed post. The goal was to use our nationally recognized and awarded career preparation program and staff as experts in their field, providing tips that would be applicable to high school students beginning to think about college and career choices. The viral list explicitly does not hard-sell Connecticut College. Instead, our resources, program and staff are mentioned casually as expert advice providers and case study examples. In a break from norm, this was the first viral content we produced that was not aimed at our internal audience, and thus, it performed poorly on our social media channels where we only reach our self-selected community (those who have explicitly 'liked' or 'followed' us.) To reach our target demographic, we experimented for the first time with sponsored and targeted Facebook and Twitter posts to high school senior-aged students in distinct states. A rewarding moment came about two months later when our social media listening tool noticed that another college's career office had posted our article as a resource for their students!

The ABCs of Connecticut College has proven to be our most successful and community-appreciated BuzzFeed article to date.  The concept was simple: build a dictionary of words about our campus culture, giving prospective students and "insider's feel" and giving alumni a feeling of nostalgia and pride. Each letter had to have a highly compelling visual element. Using a combination of College photography, video and community Instagrams, the result was a diverse, lively and fresh look at Connecticut College with content that would remain reusable in the future.

In April 2014, Connecticut College celebrated the inauguration of our 11th President. The event included weeks of lead-up on social media (including an engaged audience using #ThinkDoLead, the weekend's theme,) and the installation ceremony was live-Tweeted and webcast. Following the event, I wanted to summarize the inspiring weekend in ways that our already-engaged audience would not have seen. As such, regurgitating many of the live-shared photography would not be fresh or interesting. Similarly, a Storify wouldn't do the weekend justice. I turned to BuzzFeed to create 11 Epic Moments from Inauguration Weekend, a list which focused heavily on the ceremony's most poignant, moving and lighthearted moments. These were moments that you had to witness, they couldn't have been live-Tweeted. I turned to GIFs, creating looping reels of our favorite parts of the event: the SGA president getting so excited by a round of applause, he briefly forgot to finish his speech; an alum bringing the audience to their feet to give the new president a warm, unabashed welcome despite the formal setting; the new president herself, a musicologist, spontaneously conducting the audience during a singing portion. These were moments that made the event special, and though a perfect combination of GIFs on a viral list, the broader community got to relive everything.

In celebration of the College's recent presidential inauguration, which was intentionally scheduled to take place on the College's 103rd birthday, I used the opportunity to share my love of Connecticut College's history and architecture with out community. Using BuzzFeed, I created a one-stop-shop for everything one might wish to know about the architecture of campus. Admittedly, it was a long-form post, however each building featured a historical photograph, one paragraph of historic information, along with one interesting fact. This system was important to keeping each building's entry digestible and consistent. The list was a hit with alumni and current students, two groups that know these spaces inside and out. It also because a source that could dispel harmless but inaccurate rumors on campus (No, the North Complex was not designed to be converted to a medical hospital in the Cold War, despite campus lure and its coincidental H-shape.)

Since winter 2014, BuzzFeed has become our institution's best way to showcase the pride our student and alumni feel about the campus' beauty. Indeed, BuzzFeed makes it easy to showcase the College's photos and the photos taken by our community on Twitter and Instagram in a linear, article-like format. Definitive Proof That Connecticut College Is Secretly A Winter Wonderland is the first of a seasonal series that highlights the beauty of our campus (and occasionally the activities that go on here) during the seasons of winter, spring and fall.