Brain Waves Blog

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.

An institution’s online conversation volume is an indication of how many people are talking about it. Once you know the conversation volume for your institution, you can segment it to see who is talking about you, what they’re talking about, and where they’re talking. All of this helps you better understand the conversation about your institutional brand and create a strategy that resonates with your audiences.

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.

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.