With social listening you collect the conversation as it happens, offering opportunities to understand what’s happening now so you can make changes for the future. But the real power comes with the ongoing analysis and context that allows you to better understand your baseline conversation and create personal benchmarks, track seasonal changes, evaluate the effects of crises, and measure the impact of new campaigns.
We’re sharing a sneak peek into the types of insights our client partners get by digging into some aspects from our report, Social Listening Benchmarks for Higher Education: January 2021. If you caught our last blog post, we explored social media as a conversation source and how you can analyze your campus’s online conversation against a comparable sample. Now we’re looking into news as a content source and how sites labeled or promoted as news sources can inform your content strategy. The posts should give you an idea of the depth of analysis and insight you can get as a partner.
We’re sharing a sneak peek into the types of insights our client partners get by digging into some aspects from our report, Social Listening Benchmarks for Higher Education: January 2021. It’s intended to support you in analyzing your campus’s online conversation behavior against a comparable sample. The report covers online conversation trends in higher education and institutional benchmarks by enrollment size and type. But we also looked at where these conversations were happening—what were the sources of the conversations? It’s important to understand where your annual conversation occurs. It informs where to invest your time and effort, and guides your overall content strategy.
As soon as we decided to start Campus Sonar, I committed to providing social listening benchmarks for the higher education industry. This was a direct response to what I heard from campus-based professionals at conferences and during research conversations. While the concept of social listening was intriguing, administrators weren’t sure how much conversation they should expect to find about their campus. Once they looked and knew how much conversation there was, the first question they had was “is that normal?” This is why we released our 2019 Online Conversation Benchmarks study—I wanted every college and university to be able to measure their online conversation and know how it compared to their peers.
With graduations across the country this spring, universities gained thousands of new alumni. But as soon as students graduate and leave campus, it becomes harder to engage with them and continue to build a relationship. One of the keys to connecting with new alumni is to not wait until they’ve graduated, but to engage with them before they become alumni. The more engaged and connected students are to an institution, the more likely they are to become engaged alumni. This speaks to Dr. Jay Le Roux Dillon’s idea of alumni identity—the measure of how deeply a graduate associates their own self-identity with their alma mater. The closer alumni feel to your institution, the more they’ll feel compelled to give—both time and money.
Late in February, with the college basketball season hitting its home stretch, the sport’s biggest rivalry returned to the biggest stage, with the eighth-ranked North Carolina Tar Heels visiting the top-ranked Duke Blue Devils.