Happy Valentine's Day! Last year our Valentine's gift to you was The Higher Ed Social Listening Handbook. Because we appreciate you so much, we're gifting you again this year—introducing our newest research report, 2019 Online Conversation Benchmarks for Higher Education: A Social Listening Study.
Social media is now pervasive in everyday life—roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults use Facebook, Instagram, or both. With so many users, the platforms are constantly evolving. This is especially true with recent privacy concerns over public vs. private information. The changes to data privacy are important in helping you recognize what can and can’t be analyzed to gain valuable insights about your institution. This super technical post can help you understand the data sources we’re able to gather in our social listening analysis. And if you make it past the nerd-speak, we’ll fill you in on what the changes mean for Campus Sonar’s data, the impact on higher education, and how we’re looking forward to help you achieve better outcomes.
When you’re recruiting prospective students, you want to know what they’re saying about your university. One way you can learn what students are saying is through traditional audience research methods, social audience intelligence, or a combination of both. The research analysts at Brandwatch used social data to learn more about prospective student conversations surrounding applying to college.
When you think of someone who’s shaking up social media, who comes to mind? At Campus Sonar, we think of Liz—our founding director. Lucky for us, so did this year’s Movers and Shaker’s Advisory Board. Liz was honored as a 2018 Social Mover and Shaker—an industry thought leader in the use of social media for their brand or client. We couldn’t agree more!
The definition of crisis is “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.” To effectively monitor and manage a crisis and understand the decisions they need to make, organizations must be plugged into the online conversation. Strong, strategic social listening in a crisis ensures you know a crisis on campus is brewing before you get a call from your president, allows you to monitor the issue in real-time to inform your PR response, ensures campus safety, and mitigates brand impact.
Social listening is a flexible and direct way to earn insight into understanding the mindset of your target audience. Audience research and conversation analysis allows you to identify a target population and analyze all (or a sample of) their conversations over a defined period of time. Campus Sonar recently worked with Spring Hill College (SHC) in Mobile, Alabama. Using conversation analysis, Campus Sonar helped SHC uncover their brand and define it so they could move forward, using brand research to build their strategy.