After entering a party, there’s about a 10-minute window during which college girls’ inner social media star has a spiritual awakening.
Sprouting her Instagram influencer wings, she scouts for lighting, location and an innocent bystander to shoot no less than five poses and seven candids in between. It’s a serious job, capturing the college lifestyle one Boomerang at a time.
But with her nightly posts, punny yet pointed captions and thematic representation of the college brand, could she in fact be IU’s best marketing tool yet?
If you take a look at typical social influencers, it’s not too far of a stretch. While many times they’re meant to sell a product, their marketed imagery also promotes a branded lifestyle for followers to recognize and desire.
In the same way, good old college girls don’t have to sell a product, but they can still sell the branded image of what it means to be an IU student. From tailgates to wine nights to I-Core graduations, they market their college experiences through careful photocomposition and VSCO presets.
And as this unofficial IU social media brand has become more developed, its Instagram guidelines have also become clearer.
For the IU branded night out, influencers post with denim skirts, an elevated surface and a caption that sneaks fraternity letters into a well thought-out pun. For the IU branded gameday, go for matching cheerleader skirts, a crowded background and a caption that mentions winning the tailgate while most likely losing the game.
Well-filtered and routinely updated, it’s the ideal social media campaign for IU, with no cost and no effort. Even still, the Office of Admissions gets to reap the rewards.
According to a 2012 Zinch study, 68 percent of high schoolers said they reference college students’ social media to research potential universities.
To clarify, this study doesn’t point to universities' official Instagram accounts that post campus study spots and academic achievement infographics. Instead, high schoolers are looking to schools’ location tags, which offer a feed of all public content posted on campus.
While maybe IU’s own location tag doesn’t offer the same brand its official account sells, it markets the students’ true experiences.
More specifically, it markets the experiences of our dear friends who arrive at the party at 11 p.m. and metamorphosize into polymathic branding, marketing and influencing aficionados by 11:01 p.m.
And for the next nine minutes, they scout for brick wall backdrops and teach frat boys how to aesthetically tilt the frame. They gather their squad from all corners and pose in varying and creative formations. They vow to check and recheck the taken photograph without shame until it meets their highest of standards.
They do all this for the brand while IU sits back and watches. It’s the school’s most successful marketing effort it never even knew about.
