Eastern Michigan University

Specific Project: Social Media campaign

Goal: Set Eastern Michigan University apart from other colleges by regularly operating and maintaining  their social networking campaign — creating conversations and updating news/events daily.

Challenge: Creating an engaged "real time" community, listening and providing relevant content and rapid response and measuring progress through social media monthly reports

Strategy: Update Facebook, Twitter and YouTube hourly for EMU; Sparked conversation on various topics to create EMU into an online, yet living and breathing organism; Delivered up-to-date content to students via messages and statuses

Results: Increased awareness of university news while increasing attendance of campus-wide events; Increased friend total by 100% and fans by 450% in eight months

Specific Project: Explore Eastern

Goal: Launch a fully-managed social networking campaign to promote and increase attendance to the Fall 2008 iteration of their biannual recruiting event, Explore Eastern.

Challenge: In under 4 weeks, we created social sites, built a following and promoted the event – speed was the critical issue. 

Strategy: Created Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Myspace channels for EMU; Executed follower-building tactics; Delivered promotional content to prospective students wherever they “lived” online.

Results: Number of guests increased 101% compared to the previous record attendance. The rate of guests converting into enrolled students increased 85% from the previous Explore Eastern. The university considered this campaign an overwhelming success, as it was the only new marketing initiative from the previous events.

We have since been retained as their ongoing social media agency and have delivered improvement every year.

Client Testimonial

"Social Media. These two words have become intimidating to many companies over the course of the last two years. The constant demand for communication, maintenance and transparency require knowledge that exceeds most employees. Many companies wonder if they can afford it while other wonder if they will be able to track their return on investment. I had the same concerns and many more. In the past couple years I have had the pleasure to work with Hunchfree directly. They have become an essential part of our team and platform we use to communicate to our growing audiences over Southeastern Michigan. Prior to their engagement we were constantly looking for new mediums to integrate with traditional media, little did we know that the answer was right in front of us the entire time. Hunchfree helped us with marketing our Basketball programs, which lead to a 93% increase in women’s attendance and a 24% increase in men’s basketball games. In addition they have created new ways to share stories and valuable input from our students and reported accurately at the end of each month about the increase of traffic. I can honestly say I wonder how I ever managed our social media pages without them. I recommend that any company that is ready to take a step forward in this economy to hire them immediately." - Meghan Britton, EMU Marketing Team