Erin Marquino, a junior at the University of Missouri, US, sits in a hammock while working on her laptop in a photo she posted on Instagram in early September.

“Having completely virtual classes has its perks sometimes, but @Mizzou has made it easy to be on campus, too!!” the caption reads. “It’s also been great partnering with them on this campaign to bring awareness to their Renewal Plan! Be sure to keep practising Covid-19 safety procedures like wearing a mask, sanitising & socially distancing, especially on campus!”

In a September 17 post, Caleb Poorman, a freshman, looks straight into the camera, shirtless, wearing a Mizzou-branded mask. “Hey guys, I hope your school year is going well! In these troubling and uncertain times, it’s important to stay focussed and still have fun,” he wrote in the caption. “For those who may be struggling with everything going on, the University of Missouri counselling centre offers remote individual therapy,” he said, adding a phone number students could call to schedule counselling.

Around the US, colleges have enlisted students to help share coronavirus safety messaging on official school channels. The University of Missouri has gone a step further. Over the summer, it hired six of its students, including Marquino and Poorman, to serve as social media influencers, sharing content written by the university about the coronavirus on their personal accounts.

Other schools are ramping up similar programmes as the fall semester begins.

“We’ve never tried this before,” said Christian Basi, director of media relations at the University of Missouri. “But we felt that this particular situation was so important that we wanted to make sure we were reaching students in a format, on a platform that they would most respond to.

From Caleb’s instagram page Sourced by the Telegraph

“Students don’t read email details,” he said. “They’re not going to necessarily listen to a speech or watch a video by an administrator but they will listen to their friends, and they will listen to their peers, and they will certainly watch them on social media.”

Safety first

Brands have often hired college students to promote their products on social media, seeking access to the coveted youth demographic.
But in recent years, some students have been hired by the marketing departments of their own colleges. These programmes have typically targeted high schoolers the college is hoping to enrol. Increasingly, universities are using influencers to reach their own students, spurred by Covid-19 outbreaks and with the aim of preventing outbreaks on their campuses.

“It’s no surprise that colleges know their students are living and breathing social media,” said Windsor Hanger Western, who is the CEO of the student marketing firm Her Campus Media.

Hanger Western pointed to influencer twins Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight as an example of what the future will look like for university marketing. The twins, who have millions of followers on Instagram and YouTube, are paid by Baylor University, US, which they attend, to promote the school as a destination for prospective students. (In August, the twins announced on Instagram that both had contracted Covid-19. “It is NOT due to in person classes that this happened,” they wrote, praising Baylor’s safety precautions.)

Temple University, US, has created paid positions for student vloggers, and shared campus influencers’ content on its official social channels. “We keep a good pulse on the influencers in our student body,” Kristen Manka-White, a marketer at the school, says.
The University of Maryland, US, plans to start paying students to share coronavirus safety information on social media in the coming weeks as part of a larger student ambassador programme, said Sophie Tullier, assistant director of assessment and research for the division of student affairs.

Campus marketing experts expect to see colleges spend more on influencers, especially with the pandemic cutting off other avenues for in-person promotion.

“They’re having to rethink a little bit of how they approach marketing because there’s no face-to-face contact with their students, so I think we definitely will see an acceleration toward more modern forms of digital marketing,” said Brian Freeman, CEO of Heartbeat, an influencer marketing company that employs 20,000 college influencers. “It’s the one channel that they can guarantee all their students will see content that they want them to see.”

Paid mouthpieces

Missouri paid Glacier, a Canadian influencer marketing firm, $10,300 (about Rs 75,000) to hire the six students who have posted on their personal Instagram accounts about masks, social distancing and the school’s mental health services. Glacier CEO Matt Diteljan declined to say how much each student was being paid.

Some students are sceptical of colleges turning their peers into paid mouthpieces.

“It just felt so incredibly frustrating to see that Mizzou spent all this money on these influencers,” said Caitlin Danborn, a sophomore. “It just felt so, so shallow and so performative.” The 19-year-old said she felt pandered to by the influencers’ posts. The cheerful images, she said, don’t match up with the anxiety and frustration that she and other students feel about attending school amid a pandemic.

New York Times News Service