Brain Waves Blog

Social listening is a flexible and direct way to earn insight into understanding the mindset of your target audience. Audience research and conversation analysis allows you to identify a target population and analyze all (or a sample of) their conversations over a defined period of time. Campus Sonar recently worked with Spring Hill College (SHC) in Mobile, Alabama. Using conversation analysis, Campus Sonar helped SHC uncover their brand and define it so they could move forward, using brand research to build their strategy.   

Sometimes when people hear social listening, they think that online analysis is limited to social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. Luckily—for both analysts like myself and for our clients—that’s not the case! As many colleges and universities earn reviews from prospective and current students, alumni, and parents on sites like College Confidential and Cappex, it’s important to understand the picture these reviews paint of higher education institutions. Campus Sonar uses social listening to gather reviews from these sites and analyze both positive and negative comments. We capture the thoughts about a higher education institution from across the internet, which could include: the typical student, why others recommend (or don’t recommend) it, opinions on academic programs and resources, or other trending topics from the cost of tuition to the food in the cafeteria.

Quality data and insights are valuable to higher education marketers. In Are You a Modern Marketer? we maintain that these insights help higher education professionals create data-informed strategies to drive recruitment, growth, and enrollment. But how do higher education professionals find data and leverage the insights accordingly?

When I saw the opportunity to lead a centralized social media effort in higher education, I jumped at the chance. Luckily, it was also at North Carolina State University—in one of America's fastest growing cities, Raleigh, NC.

2017 was the year for higher education to embrace influencer marketing. I know, because I googled "influencer marketing higher education" and the top three results for the year were about higher ed marketing trends. If you're feeling a little behind now that 2017 is on its way out, read Five 2017 Marketing Trends and What They Mean For Higher Education from Stephen App at eCity Interactive—he set the precedent for applying the mainstream influencer marketing trend to our industry.

Brand benchmarking is one way to strategically use social listening. As a modern brand manager, you need to understand the online conversations about your brand to gain competitive insights and develop an effective brand strategy. One benchmark metric you can use to evaluate online reputation is share of voice.