Brain Waves Blog

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. 

The average number of institutions a student applies to has been steadily increasing, and your prospective students evaluate your campus against many others. To help your institution stand out, one of the best uses of time and resources is building competitive intelligence—the process of gathering and analyzing information about peer institutions to inform your own positioning. 

A savvy analyst can draw conclusions even when the data they’re presented with is limited in scope or volume. While these conclusions come with limitation disclaimers, they still offer a valuable point of consideration when you’re developing your campus strategy and identifying which problems are most in need of solutions. Research Manager Amber Sandall and Client Success Manager Beth Miller share what our analysts look for in social data when the answer to their research question isn’t always obvious at first glance as well as some specific ways that social data can inform campus decision making.