Last week was the first week having new students on campus. In an attempt to direct students to our Facebook Fan Page to interact with each other, we launched a photo challenge during our orientation program.
The challenge:
The team who uploads the most photos to our Facebook Fan Page by 2pm on Friday will receive an award at the awards presentation Friday.Before we announced this to the teams, we made sure all the group leaders were aware of what we were doing to make sure they encouraged their team to participate.
Also the team who uploads the most interesting photo will receive an award Friday.
There were a few other rules we gave teams on the first day.
- Duplicates do not count
- Only photos that have the team name in the description or tagged will count
The Stats:
After lunch I checked to see how everything was going. About five hours into the challenge we had 20 new fans, 84 photos uploaded and links to 343 more photos.
At the end of day one we were at:
- 30 new fans
- 216 photos
- 343 more photos linked to
Day Two stats:
- 50 new fans
- 1053 photos
- 370 more photos linked to
Day Three Stats:
- 59 new fans
- 3300 photos uploaded
- 5000 more photos lined to
One student posted a non statistical breakdown on the photos:
Although not 100% accurate at times it seemed like it was.The Unexpected:
- I was leading an orientation group. Our first activity was to check out a camera from the library, take a group picture and upload it to the Facebook Fan Page. What?! No one told me there were going to be activities having us upload things to the Fan Page. There were two activities to earn points that involved the Fan Page. Great Idea! Just wish I could have had a heads up.
- 5000+ pictures! Let me say here I truly only expected between 500-800 photos.
- One of our staff members put together a small contest to help with the "Most Interesting" Photo contest. This is what came of it.
Where we messed up...
I guess duplicate means one thing to one person and another to a freshman college student. The most common photo series uploaded where ones of rapid fire photos going around the room that should have been stitched together in Photoshop and then uploaded. At one point we had a group leader hang his camera around his neck and set it to go off every 5 seconds.
Also, we need to state what is classified as a photo. To me, it is clear enough to make out what is happening in the photo and is not of walls, skies and railings unless the walls, skies and railings help tell a story of what happened.
Success?
All in all I believe this was a success. Since the end of the contest, we have had more activity on our Page. However, we will not find out if it was a true success in getting students to come to our Fan Page to interact until later in the year.
(Checkout other great examples of Social Media use in HigherEd at .eduGuru)
4 Comments:
Interesting. I didn't realize there was a prize for volume -- yikes! I presumed it was just a Best Photo (or Best # Photos), so now it makes sense why you had so many. But it definitely promotes Fan activity, albeit to the point of obsessiveness for some. But you have those in every crowd, and it shows enthusiasm. Very clever!
Awesome. Sounds like a WIN to me. 5000+ pics (of any quality) is amazing. Kudos.
I'd rather have quality over quantity for facebook photos... that pie chart breakdown... 5% good = 95 % failure?
http://www.facebook.com/GeekUniversity#/photo_search.php?page=2&oid=44870336311&aid=-1&auser=&view=all
Rename it Blair Witch Photo Contest next year!
It was our first campaign to drive students to our Facebook Page. We have increased traffic. Yes quality over quantity is always preferred, but we didn't want to have students feel that if their pictures weren't perfect they wouldn't be accepted to the contest.
PS- The breakdown was also "unofficial."
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