Using Influencers on Your Campus

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. 

What Are Influencers?

Social media influencers are people and organizations with an expert level of knowledge or social influence in a particular field. They often have access to a large audience and are able to persuade others based on their authenticity and reach.

Influencers are people you can strategically reach out to and partner with to help your organization achieve specific marketing goals. They provide the opportunity to harness the power of peer influence for strategic impact, and they:

• Have the trust of their community or audience.
• Drive discussion around key topics.
• Answer the questions their audience is asking.
• Are highly engaged with their community.

Using Influencers in Higher Education

In higher ed, this means spreading your brand's message through the people who experience it—current students, alumni, counselors, faculty, and others. And influencer marketing can be a great way to spread your message, build your brand, or promote fundraising. 

Research tells us that three factors generally influence college choice:

• Institutional Communication. The traditional work marketers and recruiters do day in and day out—and the research on this subject specifically identifies web content, advertising, and print communication as influential.
• Student-Related Factors. Many practical determinants affect college admission, such as academic ability, test scores, GPA, and cost, as well as demographics and socioeconomic status.
• Greater Social Environment. This factor differs from the first two in that the findings are less clear on the impact of social environment on college choice. Family influence is fairly well understood by researchers, but peer influence is not—particularly when adding social media to the mix. Signs indicate that peers influence college choice similarly to general consumer choice, but the research hasn’t had time to catch up and come to a consensus on this.

With social media emerging as a college choice influencer, peer influence and social media are that much more important in the higher ed marketplace. This means the people, personalities, and stories represented through social media influence students, alumni, and the overall higher ed community.

Finding Influencers

Whether you do your own social listening (or work with a company like us!), you'll likely run across two main types of influencers:

• People who post about your campus often but may not necessarily have a large following. These are often the students, employees, or athletics fans.
• People who only post about your brand once or twice but have a larger following, so their posts reach a bigger audience.

Both of these types of influencers could impact the conversation about your school, but you need to determine if they have the ability to be strategic influencers who can create authentic advocacy for your campus. The influencers who will have the most impact are those who:

• Are reachable. Do they have a real connection to your campus or someone who can connect you to them? Someone whose family member is a student or employee would be more reachable than someone making an appearance on campus.
• Have a vested interest in your school, such as alumni. Perhaps your campus has a celebrity alumnus with a large Twitter following, but often those with a more modest number of followers (1,000–5,000) are more reachable and a more viable influencer, since they're likely to be more connected to their followers.

At Campus Sonar, our data analysts search your online conversation to identify authors from your desired audience. We segment based on your campus's goals to provide you with a list of influencers you can use, such as top active individual authors on Twitter, organizations, journalists, forum authors, or blog authors. 

Now What?

Once you find your influencers, follow our best practices to integrate them into your marketing strategy. You can also research what your competitors are doing and how they’re using influencers to build their brand. Some good examples are:

• Creating Long-term Partnerships: Engaging Students and Alumni Influencers
• When Students Become Storytellers: Students as Social Media Influencers
• A Missed Influencer Opportunity: When Students Bring Social Media Followers to Campus

Now that you've found viable connections to your campus, start to work with them to impact your social media and brand strategies.