Brain Waves Blog

We’re sharing a sneak peek into the types of insights our client partners get by digging into some aspects from our report, Social Listening Benchmarks for Higher Education: January 2021. If you caught our last blog post, we explored social media as a conversation source and how you can analyze your campus’s online conversation against a comparable sample. Now we’re looking into news as a content source and how sites labeled or promoted as news sources can inform your content strategy. The posts should give you an idea of the depth of analysis and insight you can get as a partner.

We’re sharing a sneak peek into the types of insights our client partners get by digging into some aspects from our report, Social Listening Benchmarks for Higher Education: January 2021. It’s intended to support you in analyzing your campus’s online conversation behavior against a comparable sample. The report covers online conversation trends in higher education and institutional benchmarks by enrollment size and type. But we also looked at where these conversations were happening—what were the sources of the conversations? It’s important to understand where your annual conversation occurs. It informs where to invest your time and effort, and guides your overall content strategy. 

Why do campuses and their partners put so much effort into “brand”? Because good brand building leads to enhanced perception. It's good to start with perception because it's a metric that's measurable and can be applied to multiple target audiences. Perhaps more importantly, increased perception leads to increases in revenue generating metrics—enrollment, fundraising, auxiliary income, etc.

Social listening may seem simple, especially if you’re getting a pitch from a software company. Just enter your search terms, and ta-da—social data. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Each software product collects data differently, and the data that’s returned may come with nuances that aren’t obvious to the casual user. Since social listening is all that we do, I’m sharing what we’ve learned working with millions of social mentions from about over a hundred institutions. Hopefully it will help you make an informed decision about how to approach social listening for your campus.

Although they're not the most exciting part of social media management, well-defined guidelines and policies are essential for a consistently effective social media program. In addition to giving you something to turn to in stressful situations, guidelines and policies have a couple of benefits.

Higher education social media managers operated in crisis mode for at least half of this year. It was—yes, I'm going to say it—unprecedented. It also highlighted, for better or worse, the essential role of social media in campus communications.