Growing the Taiwanese Student Association's Instagram into a real campus presence — turning club events and everyday community moments into content that reached far beyond its own members.
ROCSAUT — the Taiwanese (R.O.C.) Student Association at UTM — is a student-run cultural and social club that hosts events, celebrates Taiwanese culture, and builds community for students at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
Most of what made the club worth joining — the events, the culture, the "super warm family" feeling members talked about — happened in person and was hard to see from the outside. My goal was to grow awareness of the club, increase engagement, and create content that could reach students well beyond its existing members — not by simply posting event flyers, but by turning everyday club moments into stories students actually wanted to share.
Turn everyday club moments into stories students actually wanted to share.
Before any new content went out, the account was dealing with a few compounding issues:
The club needed a content strategy that balanced five things at once:
I analyzed existing content performance, audience engagement patterns, high-performing student organization accounts, Reels trends, and viewer retention behavior. Four insights became the foundation of the strategy that followed.
Relatable, meme-style club-life content consistently outperformed straightforward event posters.
Audiences responded more strongly to real students and their personalities than to graphics alone.
Short-form videos with strong hooks generated dramatically higher watch time.
Content built around cultural identity and belonging resonated as strongly as party and event content.
Instead of posting whatever footage happened to exist that week, I built a framework so every piece of content had a clear job to do.
Countdowns, ticket drops, and recaps for Homecoming, Halloween Condo Party, BBQs, and Sports Day — turning each event into a multi-part story instead of a single flyer.
Taiwanese identity, traditions, and the "super warm family" ethos members kept describing — content that humanized the club and gave new students a reason to belong.
POV videos and in-jokes about club life — the single-life humor, the matchmaking-event anticipation, the everyday chaos of running a club — made to feel shareable, not promotional.
Open with a line real enough to stop a scroll, before a single event detail is explained.
The middle section builds curiosity and lets the event's energy or the club's culture speak for itself.
Every Reel closes on a ticket link, an RSVP, or a recap that invites the audience into the next event.
I continuously monitored reach, views, shares, saves, watch time, engagement rate, and follower growth — instead of assuming what worked, performance data guided every content decision that followed, so the account kept improving instead of guessing.
Leaned into meme-style, POV club-life humor instead of straight announcement graphics — the data showed it consistently outperformed posters.
Made the first three seconds a non-negotiable part of every Reel, before a single event detail was explained.
Organized content into Event Hype, Club & Culture, and Relatable Moments instead of posting whatever flyer existed that week.
Let weekly analytics — reach, saves, watch time — decide what to make next, rather than personal taste.
One Reel became the clear high-water mark of the campaign — reaching far beyond the account's typical audience at the time.
views on the single highest-performing Reel of the campaign.
likes — roughly 38x the account's entire follower base at the time.
comments, turning a single Reel into an active community conversation.
ROCSAUT runs on five departments — Admin, Marketing, Events, Finance, and Public Relations. Every Reel meant working across whichever team owned the moment: Events for the party details worth hyping, PR for the tone of a cultural post, Admin for the executive team features.
Regular check-ins with the executive team kept content aligned with what the club actually needed each week, rather than what happened to be easiest to film.
Through strategic content planning and data-driven optimization, I turned Instagram from a quiet events bulletin into a real growth and community platform for the club.
The project showed how content strategy, storytelling, and audience research can make club life feel worth watching — and by focusing on human-centered storytelling with continuous iteration, the account reached stronger visibility, higher engagement, and greater awareness among students well beyond its existing membership.
Strategy
Analytics
Content Design
Communication
Product Thinking
This project strengthened my understanding of how users discover, engage with, and share digital content. It reinforced the importance of combining qualitative insight, quantitative analytics, and storytelling to create experiences that resonate with an audience.
It also deepened my ability to use data as a design tool — continuously improving outcomes through experimentation and iteration, rather than assumption.