A bit of background…
Founded in 1826 University College London (UCL) is one of the world’s leading multi-disciplinary universities, with more than 11,000 staff and 39,000 students from 150 different countries.
The Faculty of Medical Science at UCL is world renowned for its heritage, pioneering thinking, and excellence in medical teaching. It offers a wide range of courses and academic degrees including medicine, surgery and interventional sciences, PhDs in medical sciences and online MScs for clinicians and healthcare professionals. It has a richness of expertise, key policy makers and projects to draw on, and the media regularly seeks faculty members to share their points of view.
The Faculty of Medical Sciences wanted to increase its efforts to drive its reputation, share the achievements of the faculty and its staff, and communicate its unique mix of traits to key audiences.
The brief
UCL’s Faculty of Medical Sciences wanted to use social media as a key part of its strategy to reach new audiences, tell the Faculty’s stories and showcase its people and projects.
The faculty also wanted to drive engagement within the department and the wider UCL community.
UCL Medical Sciences needed to ensure that its social media channels could be efficiently managed on a day-to-day basis. UCL also wanted to have the expertise of someone who could strategically develop their social media presence.
Social Elements is completely reliable, conscientious and trustworthy, so I don't have to worry about our social media output on a daily basis.... We were most surprised by how much benefit can be gained from a small amount of support.
What we did
Social Elements focused on UCL’s user personas and target audience to share and create relevant content and engage with the target audience – all the while measuring the success with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Social Elements also produced a platform and content strategy for Instagram which identified relevant hashtags, influencers and engagement.
We therefore delivered a package which included full social media management on Twitter, a social media strategy for Instagram as well as testing content on LinkedIn. This meant that UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences had total peace of mind that their social media channels were being managed expertly and professionally. We were able to significantly increase quality output on the platforms and provided UCL with expert advice on their organic social media campaigns.
In addition, we launched a new Instagram feed and so helped UCL reach a new audience not previously covered on social media.
We were able to build a solid framework for UCL’s social media content strategy ready to handover to an in-house team.
The results
All social media channels grew in terms of followers, engagement rates and the volume of content shared. Though there was already a strong presence on Twitter, Social Elements increased follower numbers by 41%, and the Faculty had an increase of followers on LinkedIn by 198% and on Instagram by 125%.
At the beginning of the pandemic UCL Medical Sciences supported the efforts to help care for those affected by Covid-19 and the race to find more effective treatment. They released their medical students, staff and researchers from their normal duties so that they could volunteer to help in whichever way they were able. Social Elements used the social media platforms to support and raise awareness for those activities.
More about UCL
UCL is 9th in the world for Medicine and No. 1 in London. They have been educating doctors and scientists in London since 1834. With ‘brave thinking’ at the heart of UCL’s new positioning, the Faculty of Medical Science is moving forwards with an ambitious and integrated communications plan. To find out more about what UCL can offer click here.
