Meet Your Fellow Higher Ed Social Pros – Let’s Connect!

Hi everyone!

I am Courtney Witmer, Assistant Director of Social Media at Penn State, where I manage 7 interns, analytics, paid social efforts (including our new Influencer program), teach a Digital PR class for our school of communications, and am the primary manager of the brand TikTok account.

Coming from a background in industry, one of the things I find uniquely challenging about Higher Ed is the conservatism in terms of social. It’s been hard to get buy in for a lot of thing that seem pretty mundane to me from a social perspective, but we’re getting there and the fight has been so worth it!

As an alum as well as an employee, I’m proud to say our mascot is the ‘stately Nittany Lion’

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m the manager of the Social Media Team at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

What I love about my job is the opportunity to take really complex, and sometimes life changing research and turn it into understandable, engaging and educational content for our audience - without taking ourselves too seriously!!

Our mascot is Hunter the Hippocampus (who recently went viral for crashing the library during study time: https://www.tiktok.com/@uni_newcastle/video/7503806855597149456). 

Hey there 👋 My name is Al Campion, Assistant Director of Social Media for Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I think higher ed is unique in that those around you (both coworkers and ‘customers’) are continually willing to learn new things. I don’t think that’s true of very many other professions, so in a field like social where continued learning and adaptability are required, the buy-in become a lot easier to get than other industries--at least in my experience.

Contrary to popular belief (Google included, sometimes), UofI does not have a mascot! We haven’t been the Chiefs in nearly 20 years, and no, we have not adopted the Kingfisher as a mascot 🫠

I used to work at UWGB with Cindy Bailey! Love everything y’all are doing up there!

I had no idea this hub existed! I’m Matt, Head of Digital Media at Newcastle University in the UK (are there any non-North Americans here?)
I’ve been working in social at the university for nearly 12 years now. Helped create the internal team then wiggled my way up a bit and now look after the social team and paid media team.

One thing that I find hilarious about working in social higher ed is pretty much social “best practice” isn’t “higher ed social” best practice. We got to make our own tips for success due our weird and wonderful world as public institutions that also have a hefty sized audience between 16-21

We don’t really do mascots like you do in North America but we have Percy the Lion. The suit is the same suit they had when I joined here though 🤢 (it has been cleaned since then)