The role of social media in showcasing graduate impact

23 Aug 2022

For this year's summer graduation ceremonies, the Social Media team collaborated with the Social Responsibility team to make showcasing our graduates' impact a priority across our channels

Our graduates go on to do incredible things, making their mark on both the local and wider community in a variety of ways. We know this; our audience perhaps doesn't. Which is why it's so important to draw our audience's attention to this when the opportunity arises.

Working with the Social Responsibility team to showcase the impact our graduates are going on to make, we asked our Engineering, Healthcare and Humanities graduates: 'How are you going to make a difference to society?'

These 90-second videos went a long way in demonstrating graduate impact, receiving an overwhelmingly positive response across all channels and generating 226,100 views and 35,092 engagements.

They also performed very strongly from a paid perspective, particularly on TikTok, with each post generating around 30,000 paid impressions. Paid posts helped us to target a very different audience to those who usually view our content - 30+, don’t know much about the Higher Education sector - helping us to spread the word even further.

This is only a snapshot of the work produced by the social media team during graduation; we also interviewed Lemn Sissay to mark the end of his seven-year tenure as Chancellor, spotlighted inspirational graduates, experimented with trending, light-hearted topics on TikTok, and more.

Graduates were at the heart of each piece of content, playing a significant part in the posts' success. This will remain a key objective for us during future graduation celebrations.

• For more information, read our blog.