Brain Waves Blog

March Madness May Be Gone, But Meme Madness Is Here

Download a slide deck with the data from this post.

Download a slide deck with the data from this post.

As campuses and their constituents grapple with the implications of closures, extended-spring breaks, and online instruction to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic, online conversation on the topic is ballooning. We wanted to see the amount of conversation, find patterns, and develop insights to help campuses with their communication strategy. Yesterday (March 10), we gathered all of the online conversation about the coronavirus, higher education, related closures, and transitions to online coursework. Today, we analyzed it. Here’s what we found.

One of the things I love about working in higher education is the collegiality (I didn’t even learn what that word meant until my first campus job). Although institutions compete for many of the same students, many professionals freely share knowledge, experience, mentorship, and lessons learned. Traditionally this was done in-person at conferences, and you’d be lucky to attend once a year. For the last decade, it’s been evolving—and I’m pleased that it’s evolved in favor of introverts.

As soon as we decided to start Campus Sonar, I committed to providing social listening benchmarks for the higher education industry. This was a direct response to what I heard from campus-based professionals at conferences and during research conversations. While the concept of social listening was intriguing, administrators weren’t sure how much conversation they should expect to find about their campus. Once they looked and knew how much conversation there was, the first question they had was “is that normal?” This is why we released our 2019 Online Conversation Benchmarks study—I wanted every college and university to be able to measure their online conversation and know how it compared to their peers. 

By now you’ve probably heard about TikTok, the short-form video app with more than a billion downloads worldwide and over 500 million active users. Launched in China in 2016, it entered the U.K. and U.S. markets in 2018. Currently it supports 15 languages and users in at least 75 countries. According to Google Trends, interest in TikTok as a search term peaked this summer in both the United States and the U.K., and worldwide in April 2019.

Regardless of having the word social in the name, social listening is not something you do just to get better at social media. Let’s repeat that—social listening is not just about social media! Social listening is an investment in strategic intelligence (across various channels), that gets you closer to what is being said to and about your institution with implications across almost every area of campus. Listening to your online conversation builds trust, which is arguably the most valuable commodity today.