Brain Waves Blog

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.

As a social media manager, understanding copyright is a critical component of your content creation process. And it can definitely be confusing, especially if you have multiple accounts to manage in addition to all of the other aspects of your job.

At the University of Central Florida (UCF), we’ve used influencer marketing with student social media ambassadors to create, collaborate, and distribute content on behalf of the university since 2018. We started the program by finding students who had a decent following on social media and grew it with students who showed eagerness and passion for UCF. The strength of the program and our contributing ambassadors allows us to reach a greater, more influential market of like-minded individuals and create authentic advocacy for our campus.

In the first part of this series, I shared our planning and query writing process—how our teams come together to plan each client project and the research that our analysts do in the beginning stage of each project. It was a lot! Now that you made it through part one, you'll sail through part two. Let's go!

Gear up for some Campus Sonar behind-the-scenes! I’m covering how the Research team at Campus Sonar conducts social listening research, start to finish, to pull back the curtain on what we do from project kickoff to presentation of findings and insights to the client.