Social Media at the 2017 Fung Forum
What's it like to lead social media coverage for an international conference? This was my experience at the 2017 Fung Forum.
Princeton Social Media provided live social media coverage of the Princeton-Fung Global Forum, March 20-21, 2017, in Berlin, Germany, in order to share and enhance conversations held at the conference. Through the implementation of original social media updates, photos and videos as well as user-generated content, it is possible that hundreds of thousands of people now associate Princeton with the discussion surrounding one of today’s most pressing questions: Can liberty survive the digital age?
I accompanied Woodrow Wilson School staff to the conference to create and curate content for the University’s primary social media accounts on the following platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Storify.
Coverage included live tweeting throughout each day of the conference, three Facebook posts including a Facebook Live broadcast, two Instagram posts, two Snapchat stories, a Storify collection of attendees’ social media posts and two daily Princeton homepage articles.
The University’s social media coverage was supplemented by a team of students who provided conference updates from their perspectives by sharing photos in a WhatsApp group and on personal Twitter and Instagram profiles, which I shared on the main Princeton accounts. Students also created content for Princeton’s Snapchat account for the duration of the conference. The inclusion of student voices in Princeton’s social media output contributes to a sense of authenticity for a large portion of the University’s audience.
2017’s social media metrics show an improvement over metrics from the last Fung Forum, which occurred in 2015, in several significant measurements including the reach of our content, the number of times the #PrincetonFung hashtag was used, and video views. Overall, more people talked about the Fung Forum and saw more conference-related content in 2017 than in 2015.
#PrincetonFung became a trending topic on Twitter’s Trends list both days of the conference. Per Twitter, “the Trends list is designed to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The trends list captures the hottest emerging topics…”
The Trends list amplified the Fung Forum hashtag and related content, meaning more people were made aware of it and therefore saw content combining Princeton University and conversations about liberty in the digital age that they otherwise would not have.
More social media conversation mirrored, and hopefully contributed to, increased conference attendance from the beginning of day one to the well-attended final sessions through Princeton University President Eisgruber’s closing remarks on day two when compared to the 2015 Fung Forum.
In addition to hosting speakers, panelists and attendees from around the world, the inclusion of social media promotion, live coverage and content curation in the conference’s communication strategy helped make the 2017 Fung Forum a truly global event.
-Ryan Maguire, Social Media Strategist