Musing on social media in SUs
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about the place of non-traditional media in Student Unions.
Firstly, rather than wait for freshers to arrive and – hopefully – see us Sabbatical Officers in the traditional publicity we use to whore ourselves out (posters, our own distinctive t-shirts, that kind of thing), we produced a short video to introduce ourselves:
This got plugged on my twitter feed and on the Freshers facebook group, and got lumped on the front page of uclunion.org – resulting in hundreds of views. We hope that translates into at least a few of the new students being able to recognise us as we go about running their Union for them.
We spent quite a lot of time on that video (being new to the massive camera, and to Final Cut Pro), although after a chat with @Documentally, I realised this wasn’t quite the effort we needed to go to – a small, flip-style handheld with software to upload straight to YouTube was all we need. (Of course, we still need to buy a camera or two for us to tote around campus. If there are any manufacturers needed, I can offer you a plug on every video I shoot this year…)
Then there’s twitter itself. There’s @UCLU (and plenty of other SUs out there), and my own account, @jkblacker. Problem is, I don’t have many UCL students following me. I’m mainly using it for connecting with others in the SU world – from @wesstreeting and @aaronporter from @nusuk, to our arch-rivals @kclsuVPAAEmilie and @kclsu_ryan.
Our @UCLU account has around 250 followers – just over 1% of the student population of UCL – although I can’t guarantee they’re all students, and all at UCL. Surely a Union is only for its own students - so what would be the point of reaching out to ‘random’ people like this?
Simple, really. The bigger reach @UCLU has – whether that’s to our own students or not – the more important it becomes. The more we get retweeted, the more important everyone sees us as. If we become famous among even those people who aren’t our own students, maybe more of our own students will take notice. Carpet-bombing on the internet is cheap and quick, and although it might take some time to have an impact on our own demographic, it may well have a large impact. Just as when it took national press coverage over our AGM to make our own members stand up and take notice of our democratic structures, having the UK’s most popular SU twitter account could make our members take notice of us – it’s all about reputation.
So this year, I’m going to throw my spare minutes into creating content for the web. I’ll keep a video camera with me and record what I’m doing – whether that’s my thoughts on the College committee I’ve just attended, or a quick catch-up with the Debating Society on a Monday night. I’ll tweet my heart out (as usual) and let not just my members, but the world, what I’m doing. And I’ll blog, here and on uclunion.org as appropriate. Hopefully, someone will take notice.
