Brain Waves Blog

With the demographic shift and many other changes happening on higher ed campuses, leveraging graduate enrollment as a campus growth opportunity is top of mind for many. Before you begin development, it’s critical to think through how to build competitive graduate programs and understand how to effectively recruit and retain graduate students. 

It’s not surprising that 72% of college presidents agree or somewhat agree that their institution needs to make fundamental changes in its business models, programming, or other operations (Inside Higher Ed’s 2023 survey of presidents).

As many of our readers already know (or can easily guess from the Social Strategy Fundamentals episode I recently hosted), I’m a huge fan of strategy. That’s why I’m excited to work with natural strategists like ours at Campus Sonar every day. Our team of strategists not only develops deep client relationships, but also intuitively looks at each client’s goals from all angles to find the best way to reach them.

Over the last few years, social listening software has become increasingly popular for higher ed martech stacks. But something we hear often from our clients is that marketing teams struggle to get the full value from expensive software. Lack of time, training, and ability to pull readily usable data are common struggles. 

Social listening may seem simple, especially if you’re getting a pitch from a software company. Just enter your search terms, and ta-da—social data. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Each software product collects data differently, and the data that’s returned may come with nuances that aren’t obvious to the casual user. Since social listening is all that we do, I’m sharing what we’ve learned working with millions of social mentions from about over a hundred institutions. Hopefully it will help you make an informed decision about how to approach social listening for your campus.

A savvy analyst can draw conclusions even when the data they’re presented with is limited in scope or volume. While these conclusions come with limitation disclaimers, they still offer a valuable point of consideration when you’re developing your campus strategy and identifying which problems are most in need of solutions. Research Manager Amber Sandall and Client Success Manager Beth Miller share what our analysts look for in social data when the answer to their research question isn’t always obvious at first glance as well as some specific ways that social data can inform campus decision making.