Brain Waves Blog

When you’re recruiting prospective students, you want to know what they’re saying about your university. One way you can learn what students are saying is through traditional audience research methods, social audience intelligence, or a combination of both. The research analysts at Brandwatch used social data to learn more about prospective student conversations surrounding applying to college.

If you ended up here, chances are you’ve thought about social listening. Whether you’re at the beginning stages of your research or actively trying to make the case to invest resources in it, social listening has found its way onto your radar.

The data gold rush is on in higher ed advancement, and institutions hope to hit pay dirt by leveraging this data bonanza—whether it’s identifying alumni career journeys to better match mentors to mentees or discovering alumni interests to better target communications and fundraising. But unless advancement offices have a strong strategy backed by defined and talented resources, they’ll be left with little but a server full of fool’s gold.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr… the list goes on. And for some schools, it goes on, and on, and on: at many schools, dedicated fans, student groups, professors, and departments decide to make social media accounts that are unofficially affiliated with the school. They may use your school name or logo, but the content they post may not have to follow the same guidelines and brand messaging that the official campus social media accounts do.

The definition of crisis is “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.” To effectively monitor and manage a crisis and understand the decisions they need to make, organizations must be plugged into the online conversation. Strong, strategic social listening in a crisis ensures you know a crisis on campus is brewing before you get a call from your president, allows you to monitor the issue in real-time to inform your PR response, ensures campus safety, and mitigates brand impact.

With March Madness upon us, you might notice a higher prevalence of basketball mentions in your school’s online conversation, or just online in general. While athletics can bring helpful attention and money to your school, for staff members interested in other areas of the conversation, the focus on athletics can overshadow the academic conversation and targeted brand messages. Separating the athletics conversation from the rest of the conversation is possible and can be helpful in strengthening non-athletic conversations.