With social listening you collect the conversation as it happens, offering opportunities to understand what’s happening now so you can make changes for the future. But the real power comes with the ongoing analysis and context that allows you to better understand your baseline conversation and create personal benchmarks, track seasonal changes, evaluate the effects of crises, and measure the impact of new campaigns.
In Fundamentals of Social Media Strategy: A Guide for College Campuses, Liz Gross wrote, “The general public is not your target audience. If you aim your content and efforts at everyone, they’re perfect for no one.” Defining and targeting your audience is your first step in developing and creating content, determining your brand and messaging—pretty much everything you do.
At Campus Sonar, our humans set us apart. Our experience researching and analyzing the nuances of online conversation means we understand how to measure the effectiveness of your content. We know how to analyze who sees your content and understand how that’s impacted by each platform. When you develop social media strategy and create corresponding campaigns, this is ultimately what you need to measure to show success, right? The effectiveness of your campaign. If it worked.
When you create any piece of content, a critical component is understanding your audience. Who will read your content? What are the demographics of the channel you’re publishing on? These are important questions to make sure your content resonates.
Influencers are an important part of the social listening conversation. They create a connection between audience and content, providing experiences their audience can relate to. As more and more people turn to social media to connect with others, share experiences, and search for help in making decisions, influencers have an enormous impact. In fact, a 2021 Edelman study found that 53 percent of people trust what influencers say about brands more than what the brands themselves say.
With graduations across the country this spring, universities gained thousands of new alumni. But as soon as students graduate and leave campus, it becomes harder to engage with them and continue to build a relationship. One of the keys to connecting with new alumni is to not wait until they’ve graduated, but to engage with them before they become alumni. The more engaged and connected students are to an institution, the more likely they are to become engaged alumni. This speaks to Dr. Jay Le Roux Dillon’s idea of alumni identity—the measure of how deeply a graduate associates their own self-identity with their alma mater. The closer alumni feel to your institution, the more they’ll feel compelled to give—both time and money.