YouTuber Paris Sumpter shares her experience as a student and brand ambassador at UCLA to nearly one million viewers.
Julia Trees
It’s a heady formula. With brands across the globe spending nearly $27 billion on social media marketing, an expenditure estimated to go up 37% by 2020 to reach $37 billion, and 45% of the world’s population actively engaged on social media, one unlikely sector has found a lucrative and free marketing source – college students.
Several universities across the country have begun using so-called student ambassadors or influencers to market their brand on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. According to a 2018 study by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, social media is the most influential marketing source for potential buyers. Over 70% of social media users hit the college sweet spot: individuals between the ages of 18-29.
Ben Varquez, the managing director of Youth Marketing Connection, a 20-year-old company dedicated to connecting brands such as American Eagle Outfitters, Bud Light and Capital One to younger generations, says marketing to younger individuals like millennials or Generation Z requires a different approach.
“In general we find, there’s sort of a trend in high school students, college students of trusting their peers over other sources,” Varquez says. “Social media helps students create their own social groups and develop their own insights, to essentially have their own digital orientation. Social media has changed the game and many colleges are still trying to figure out how they can be part of that conversation.”
University of Delaware’s Digital Marketing Manager Sarah Goldfarb explains when the school’s Social Media Ambassador program was launched in 2011, it represented a dramatic shift in how the school approached and engaged students.
“We realized students could offer something that our regular brand channel might not be able to,” says Goldfarb. “They had a perspective, teens could really appreciate and they could offer them something they couldn’t get anywhere else – a chance to look into their everyday lives as college students.”
Student ambassadors from the University of Delaware and other schools with similar programs such as Kent State University, Babson College, University of Central Florida or New York University post about anything from game day apparel to what they had for breakfast in the cafeteria. These posts showcasing everyday experiences make prospective students realize the university could be a home for them too, says Goldfarb.
While many schools have adopted the marketing practice, its unclear exactly how many. Several schools like the University of California Los Angeles, New York University and Grand Canyon University have not commented on their influencer programs.
However, the University of Delaware puts its social media ambassadorship front and center. Every year, Goldfarb and her team sort through hundreds of online applications, looking for students representative of multiple aspects of the college experience. The University of Delaware’s 88 student ambassadors are selected based on on-campus involvement, as well as leadership and are expected to post at least three times a week on Twitter and once on Instagram. In exchange, ambassadors are paid in merchandise and swag, front row seats at campus events and opportunities to interact with A-listers like 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden.
While the work is unpaid, student ambassadors cite networking opportunities and industry experience as their primary incentives for joining social media teams. Gillian Zucker, a former social media ambassador at the University of Delaware says the program helped her launch her career working on social strategy at Digitas Health.
The allure of a college setting on a social media following
While colleges like the University of Delaware or Kent State University are only beginning to realize the impact of student ambassadors on college recruitment, many influencers see the benefits of a college atmosphere on their social media following. For many, college has become the hip and relatable backdrop to their Internet persona.
One YouTube influencer, Paris Sumpter, known by her YouTube name LeSweetpea, says when she transferred to the University of California Los Angeles she saw college as an opportunity to create more YouTube videos.
“I thought right off the bat that UCLA or whatever college I decided to go to would be a great opportunity to create a lot of content about college,” Sumpter says. “That’s honestly what I thought when I was applying to colleges, like ‘How many videos am I going to be able to make here?’ I knew there was going to be so many that I couldn’t even think of them all and I saw that on YouTube college influencers were doing really well.”
As a student at UCLA, Sumpter went from around 6,000 to over 100,000 subscribers. On her channel, Sumpter took viewers through her everyday life, through vlogs and how-to videos. To date, her most popular video is a tour of her dorm room which has nearly 1 million views.
Sumpter saw college as a relatively unexplored and unknown frontier for many prospective students. Through her videos she aimed to pull back the curtain.
“When I got to college, I knew I wanted to showcase UCLA just because I felt like when I got accepted, I looked up so many videos, just trying to see what it would be like to be a student there and I couldn’t find what I was looking for,” Sumpter says.
As Sumpter’s experiences at UCLA continued to grow so did her influence on campus.
“People would approach me at events and tell me ‘You are the reason I decided to go to UCLA,’” Sumpter says. “Or they’d say, ‘Your videos helped me make a decision.’”
Sumpter’s influence as both a YouTuber and model at UCLA did not go unnoticed. She says throughout her time at UCLA she was frequently asked to represent brands, posting about hair products and make-up to her nearly 50,000 Instagram followers and even getting approached as a potential representative for the university.
Sumpter wasn’t the only influencer who found a following in college, one blogger, Carly Heitlinger, known online as Carly the Prepster, became a social media influencer in college before influencers were even recognized.
In 2008 as a freshman at Georgetown University, what Heitlinger thought would merely be a creative outlet became her fulltime career.
“For the first three years I didn’t really understand the extent to which people were reading my blog,” Heitlinger says. “But as I moved into my senior year, I started receiving emails from people who applied to Georgetown because I went there or people reaching out to me because they’d had similar experiences.”
When Heitlinger started writing she didn’t write about acing tests or celebrating college game days, she wrote about loneliness and the struggle to find her place at school.
“I felt like I was doing something really important,” Heitlinger says. “Even though it was embarrassing at times, I thought it was important to share that part of my college experience because I wanted to normalize it. It’s a more universal experience than the media or anyone would allow you to think. And the more I opened up about it, the more that people reached out to me and told me they were going through something similar. Ultimately, I was writing this thing that I wish I could have read as a college student.”
Today, while Heitlinger writes about other subjects, she still reflects on her college experience, providing tips and tricks for students.
