To Reach Gen-Z Students, Colleges Meet Them Where They Are — on TikTok

Believe it or not, Todd Sanders is a pro at this.

His collegiate social-media management experience, stretched over multiple universities, spans nearly 18 years. He’s had a front-row seat to the rise and fall of every once-promising app, viral challenge, and short-lived trend. Today he’s in charge of social-media operations for the University of Florida, the fifth-largest university in the country.

Yet there he was, standing on a concrete path on the Gainesville campus in the summer heat, pouring bottles of water out onto the pavement. He tried Gatorade. Sanders needed a decent-size puddle, and he needed it to be in a very specific spot so he could press record and flip his phone upside-down to get the perfect shot of Century Tower’s reflection, synched to a Steve Aoki song.

It was all for the 10-second video that would christen the university’s brand-new TikTok account.

“We looked like idiots at the time,” Sanders admits.

He didn’t know it then, but that video was at the leading edge of a new era in how colleges connect with students. TikTok, the wildly popular video app with Gen-Z roots, wasn’t just part of the student experience anymore. It’s turned into a vehicle for colleges and universities to humanize their brands and get in front of prospective students on their digital home turf.

Florida, with its 1.1 million “likes” and 86,000 followers, was something of a collegiate TikTok trailblazer when it went live, in 2018, daring to jump into a relatively unexplored territory of the app at a time when other universities were hesitant.

“Part of our job is to play,” Sanders says. “And you always get asked, ‘What’s next?’”

But, as Sanders would be the first to admit, something about TikTok was just a bit too “cringey” in the beginning. He couldn’t even get his own kids to download it. When he brought it up while teaching a social-media class in 2018, the students dismissed the app as a social network for their younger siblings in high school.

Florida’s social-media interns were enthusiastic fans of Vine, the short-form video platform that was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and shut down four years later, but they weren’t so keen about TikTok. It was, however, the closest thing they were going to get to their beloved video-looping app. So they started playing. And somehow, it caught on.

Soon, Florida football players were making snow angels in piles of confetti as “This Magic Moment” played in the background. In keeping with one of the app’s most recognizable trends, one of the innumerable alligator statues on the campus donned a cowboy hat as part of the “Yeehaw Challenge” that propelled “Old Town Road” into global acclaim.

But Florida’s account isn’t all cowboy hats and confetti snow angels. For a university, Sanders explains, TikTok is about staying relevant to a younger audience. If the students of the coming generation are going to be on TikTok, this 114-year-old institution is going to be right there with them, creating the kind of content teenagers are going to respond to.

It helps to have a president with a fair bit of social-media savvy. Kent Fuchs doesn’t just manage his own Twitter account and star in YouTube videos with titles like “Memes Look Fun.” He also claims to have snatched the title of “first university president on TikTok,” a factoid he shared to the beat of Pharell Williams’s “Happy” while congratulating incoming students on decision day in May.

App of the Year

There’s no quick way to sum up the internet subculture TikTok has spawned since its explosive rise in popularity this year. The app was started in 2016 by ByteDance, a Chinese company that subsequently bought the social-media service musical.ly and merged the two platforms into TikTok.

Corinne Richter, social-media coordinator at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, began taking TikTok’s potential seriously a couple of years ago. She saw an opportunity to create a unique touch point with prospective students — to build up the university’s brand as something relatable.

“That’s always an important thing,” she says. “Trying to get the brand in front of them as early as we can.”

The audience for the app, which just surpassed 1.5 billion downloads in November, skews young, with most users falling between the ages of 16 and 24. And that, Richter says, is the “sweet spot” for higher education.

But the life cycle of a TikTok trend is often short. And for already-busy collegiate social-media managers, that kind of brevity can be exhausting. Compared with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — where you can find just about every college posting frequently — TikTok requires an extra dose of creativity and a keen understanding of the campus culture. Keep your videos strictly academic, and your viewers will scroll right past.

LSU’s account has been around since April, but the university delayed posting on it until August, after a TikTok representative recommended the team create three to five posts each week — which was a tall order. Before the academic year started, the university’s social-media team brought in a group of interns to help plan, execute, and promote its videos.

“A big roadblock was just that we really felt like we needed to hire some people to help us create the content so we could really keep our frequency up,” Richter says. “Another thing is the trends, sounds, and hashtags are super-fleeting.”

With the interns’ help, the account’s popularity skyrocketed. One particular video — a camera-toting paratrooper skydiving into Tiger Stadium during a football game — amassed nearly 500,000 likes and more than a thousand comments, some of them from prospective students citing the stunt as part of why LSU was their dream school.

Florida came up with a different solution to keeping its million-plus followers engaged: It’s recruiting a “TikTok army.”

Students, who would not be paid, would be responsible for “crafting storyboards, capturing content, organizing and directing shoots, acting, dancing, interviewing … sharing the things that make it great to be a Florida Gator,” according to the application form.

But not every university has the capacity to build a small army of videographers and promoters. Taylor Slifko, whose work already requires running around the campus as a photographer for Austin Peay State University, in Tennessee, started her university’s TikTok this summer after seeing a presentation that highlighted Florida’s success.

Once summer ended and classes began, Slifko was hit with a realization: TikTok, for all its 15-second videos and the facade of effortless-looking production, is harder than it looks.

One day she’s meeting with the university’s opera club to coordinate the details of a new video. The next she’s working with Austin Peay’s mascot — a top-hat-sporting, white-mustachioed governor — who’s jogging up and down stairs at the campus football stadium and dancing to a trending song.

Austin Peay, which is considering using TikTok purely as a recruitment tool, is trying to keep its content light and relatable, bringing in a wide range of students and departments to showcase the university’s playful side.

“If the younger audience truly is on here, they’re not going to care about a lot of academic stuff as much as they would a funny video of the mascot dancing to their favorite song,” Slifko says.

Members of Gen Z, Sanders explains, are expecting memes. They’re expecting videos that look like the ones the app’s mysterious algorithm has been serving them. They’re not expecting a university researcher to talk about the next great thing that’s going to change the world. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. To Sanders, it’s a golden opportunity.

“We’re in this unique position where we’re allowed to have fun,” he says. “It doesn’t hurt to be doing well on a new social-media platform, because it shows that you’re innovating and you’re staying up to date. You’re not resting on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And you’re constantly searching and sharing, and learning, and growing.”

Lauren Fisher is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @lauren__fisher, or email her at lfisher@chronicle.com.