UNH Alumni’s Summer ’17 “Top 3 ½ Posts”

1 “Throwback Thursday” posts are a great way to engage with alumni, while using a trending hashtag to increase brand awareness.
With over 28,000 views, approximately 14 times the average for this page, a Throwback Thursday post about a favorite menu item from the personable and quirky Karl’s Food Truck was a hit with alumni from many generations.
This post also received over 525 likes, 47+ shares,
Karl’s existed in UNH’s Lower Quad from 1965 through 1996. Younger alums chimed in with memories of Kurt’s Food Truck that had a similar item in more recent years.

2 One of the most fun parts of working with UNH alumni is getting to meet so many of them and share their stories.
On August 18th, I attended the Creative Mornings event at The Music Hall Loft, “Genius of 100 Years” featuring centenarian University of New Hampshire alumnus, Graham Alvord ’55G.
The hour-long program, featuring a children’s timeline of the major world events that happened throughout Alvord’s life, a film from his 100th birthday, and a question-and-answer period afterwards, was live-streamed on the UNH Alumni Facebook page.
The video received a total of 2,120 video views and the average watch time was 0:08. This is consistent with past videos we have shared and a 2015 Time Health article comparing human attention spans to the 9-second attention span of a goldfish. People now generally lose concentration after only eight seconds.
3 When making promotional content, it can be a challenge to convince the producers and the writers to create such short videos, but you can see below one that was very effective during our end-of-fiscal-year fundraising campaign…
The With 78 likes, this video was the best-received post on the UNH Alumni Instagram during the campaign. It was also the one I had the most creative direction with.
I asked for an 8–10 second video that was very simple, used an image that the majority of UNH alumni resonate with (Thompson Hall’s bells chiming), didn’t have any filters over the image and had a simple display of the campaign’s logo at the end.
It worked!
What’t the final ½ post? A #UNHLove story!

Given that this is my first year at UNH, this was my first year covering reunion. And it was So. Much. Fun.
The photo above was sent to me late Friday night from our photographer, and I posted it in a slideshow on Instagram. On Saturday, I was covering events, and got to camp out in the bell tower in Thompson Hall with the photographers while groups took tours.
This couple happened to come through, and I mentioned that I had seen their photo, and did they know it was on Instagram? To my surprise, I found out that they had actually met at the lobster bake and asked if I could send them the photo via email, to both of them, so that they could be connected.
Yes, I got to play matchmaker. It was pretty special. It’s probably worth way more than a ½, but since it coincidentally happened on the same day as the launch of the 603 Challenge, it was interesting balancing the priority of both posts.
These experiences, both personally with alumni I meet and with other alumni I help connect at events or online, happen all the time as the UNH Alumni social media producer, and I couldn’t be happier helping make these new connections, and communicating these moments to our followers.
Written by:
Kris Bowden ’02
UNH Producer of Social Media
kristine.bowden@unh.edu
