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From Facebook groups to IG pages

  • November 24, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 32 views
shuchitapoddar

Hi all! At Iowa we use Facebook groups for incoming students, but we’ve noticed fewer students joining them and more gravitating toward unaffiliated “Class of” Instagram pages. Our FB groups have screening questions to keep things secure, but Instagram doesn’t offer that, which creates a whole mix of problems. We’re exploring the idea of creating private Instagram pages to meet students where they already are. I’m curious if anyone here has experience running or managing “Class of” Instagram accounts. Any advice would be helpfu

Shuchita
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    • thematthorne
    • Level 4
    • November 25, 2025

    That’s a tricky one. We used to run incoming undergraduate groups on Facebook till around 2021. We’ve yet to find a suitable replacement. Accounts for each yeah on Instagram just seemed to unmanageable, and lacked the security questions you mentioned (we’d always see a range of promo companies trying to join our Facebook groups, can’t stop that without the filtering questions).

    We switched things over to a bespoke community service provided by UniBuddy. While this provided more control over who could join/be invited - it saw less adoption as it was yet another app people had to download.

    I know some universities in the UK have started using Discord for onboarding communities. But we’ve not had the time or resource to properly investigate that as an option

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