As a one-person faculty comms team, there’s never enough time to do everything, and finding time to regularly create social media content can be difficult. To help ensure we have a regular stream of content on our student-focused Instagram account (@uvicscience), we’ve developed a strategy focused on user-generated content (UGC), where students across the faculty send us photos and captions to share.

In the span of one year, we posted 100+ pieces of user-generated content, from 100+ different students, which made up almost two-thirds of our feed posts. This strategy has allowed us to showcase our students’ experiences conducting research, on field trips and field schools, attending conferences, on exchange, with student clubs and events, and more, with a minimal time investment on our part.

Learn about how we find UGC opportunities, convince students to send us content, repurpose UGC content to amplify the reach, and the impact this strategy has had (spoiler: impressions are up 350%, engagement up 33%, and followers up 30%, year over year).