Week 7: The Search

After an exhausting search of countless possibilities trying to find any community college or university academic counseling department with a visual social media presence, I finally gave up and decided to broaden my search. I ended up going with Boston University's School of Social Work(BUSSW) as well as the main UCLA visual social media. Given that my department is fairly niche compared to any social media representing an entire university, I understood that UCLA would not be the greatest comparison of a similar business. However, I hoped that I would find ideas that I could borrow from or that would possibly provide inspiration. BUSSW on the other hand, while not a counseling department, is more targeted and I assumed that they would have less of a need for visual social media. I hoped that I could get some takeaways from them that would help me to build more robust Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube pages.

UCLA has, not surprisingly, a very impressive up-to-date Instagram account showcasing the school and its students very well. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the campus is beautiful making it easier to promote the campus as well as campus life and events. Currently we are using Instagram as another method of getting important information out to students, but seeing the UCLA account makes me think that we can use Instagram for documenting daily events. This could include information from our counselors, staff, or even something like student transfer admission notifications.

With BUSSW's Instagram and Pinterest account, there were far more ideas that I could draw from in my department's visual social media. Their Instagram account has been used to post information about school events, campus life, graduation, pictures from the School of Social Work magazine, and much more. Their Pinterest account was equally as interesting with boards ranging covering the university, Boston, Social Issues, Self help. DIY, and more. I feel that these sites would be effective to current students, as well as prospective students that may be hoping to get a better idea of what life would be like in this program. I would definitely say that these are far more related than the UCLA visual social media for what we are looking to provide to our followers.

I think that we have chosen the correct visual social media of Instagram and Pinterest. The next step will be to add YouTube, but there are some logistical issues with deleting the older YouTube accounts that we previously used.