Having been very familiar with social media, as most college students are, I was excited to be offered the opportunity to advertise the College’s Office of Sustainability. We considered which media outlets would be the most effective way to get the word out about the office as well as keeping people informed about events and ways to live more sustainable and decided that we should focus on the two largest social media forums right now: Facebook and Twitter. The Office of Sustainability already had a page that people could “like” which we could post events, pictures, and relevant material on this page and the people that have liked our page would get updates in their News Feed. We thought that this was a great way to create a fanbase for the office but considering it only had 30 or so people having liked it when we were given this project we knew that we had some work to do. We both advertised the office’s page to friends, classmates, and the rest of the Facebook world and soon had at least 80 people liking the page.  We were very excited about the success of the page and turned to making a group on Facebook where people could be more actively involved and get more notifications about postings. We quickly realized that most people on Facebook don’t appreciate constant notifications from our group, or any group really, and decided to turn our focus to Twitter. The Office had already made a twitter account (@SustainableCofC) and had a few followers. We started following other sustainability minded accounts as well as local Charleston retailers, newspapers, and school associations. We tweeted about events, our Facebook page, and we tweeted sustainable tips for our followers. We even tweeted quotes about sustainability. At this point we have about 40 followers and counting. While we’ve definitely had a few setbacks in promoting the College’s Office of Sustainability we also had an opportunity to learn effective techniques in advertising our page and Twitter. Hopefully the likes and followers will continue to grow and the word gets out to everyone that our Office of Sustainability is up and running.

~Clair

The social media project for the Office of Sustainability has been an interesting focus. The two main social media networks we focused on were Facebook and Twitter. The College of Charleston Office of Sustainability page on Facebook had already been established so we focused on expanding that page. We experimented with also creating a group, separate from the page, that was named Sustainable CofC. The CofC Office of Sustainability was not too large, it had about 36 likes. Our goal was to get to at least 75 likes and currently we have gotten to 80! This has been through word of mouth by sharing it and by increasing the amount of information posted on the wall (mainly photos, events and current news). This page turned out to be better than the Sustainable CofC group because it was easily accessible to Facebook users. The next main focus was in the Twitter account. Twitter is an easy to access and is limited in how much the users can write, making it an amusing thing to look at from people or groups that the users follow. Our user name is SustainableCofC and we focused on following many other school’s offices as well as local and nationwide news sources. In turn, we would reshare current events pertaining to sustainability while also utilizing Twitter as a way to spread word of campus events within the office. We have seen a large increase in followers, making the office, thus, more popular through its Twitter account.

~Rosemary