Brain Waves Blog

At the University of Central Florida (UCF) we learned through our standard social listening on Instagram that our students wanted campus-specific GIPHY stickers. The large number of direct messages and replies asking us to create GIPHY stickers led us to dedicate time and resources to our rather bland and useless GIPHY channel. While we technically had an account, we officially transitioned it to a brand channel. A few short months later, we released our first GIPHY sticker pack—of course flaunting UCF’s black and gold brand. And in just over nine months, our GIPHY channel grew from a whopping 104 views to more than 104 million views as of July 2019. That’s an average of 11.5 million views a month!

When I began in higher education as an academic advisor, I interacted with undergraduate students daily. From each conversation, I gleaned insights into needs, barriers, and successes students experienced at my institution. As I moved into university administration, that student-centered perspective greatly informed my work on retention and graduation initiatives. Heading into my fifth year in administration with little direct student interaction, my sense of the current student experience feels a little out of date. I realized this challenge was likely not unique to me and set out to learn what’s worked for seasoned university administrators to remain connected to the current student experience at their institutions. Here’s what I learned.

Regardless of having the word social in the name, social listening is not something you do just to get better at social media. Let’s repeat that—social listening is not just about social media! Social listening is an investment in strategic intelligence (across various channels), that gets you closer to what is being said to and about your institution with implications across almost every area of campus. Listening to your online conversation builds trust, which is arguably the most valuable commodity today.

Collegiate athletic programs exist for a number of reasons; namely, they’re a huge revenue generator, taking advantage of conference-affiliated and national television broadcasting contracts and merchandising to market their teams and universities.

You scour social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates about your institution. And you receive Google alerts when you’re mentioned in the news. But are you keeping up with Reddit?  

When I founded Campus Sonar, I wrote a blog post about the need for data-informed marketing in higher education. It’s been almost two years now and the industry has made progress, but I feel like we still have a ways to go. Recently, I contributed to a blog series for Adapt about data-driven marketing and current trends—and I realized I had a lot more to say (most of you won’t be surprised about that). So here’s part two of my thoughts on data-driven marketing, marketing trends, and the impact on higher ed.