20 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Launching a Campaign

Posted by Talmadge Boyd on December 11, 2012

Before you undertake a new marketing plan for your school, it's wise to run both an internal and external situation analysis. Changes in headcount can change your choice of integrated marketing tactics just as easily as shifts in presidential vision. Likewise, federal or local government intervention can force your team towards a new tack. Taking a hard look at the market forces that affect you will go a long way to creating a complete audience centered, measurable experience.

Even if you have been running campaigns for years, assessing your people, process, goals and technology before every campaign will give you the opportunity to improve upon last year's techniques. Examining the external landscape will focus your efforts on the positions you need to take.

With that said, here is a short list of 20 questions that will give you insight into next year's objectives, strategies and tactics.

Internal Assessment

What are your school's established goals?
What are your department's goals?
What are your previous year's results?
What resources and teams do you have available?
How are your internal teams organized?
How will they share information?
What is your internal marketing process?
What technology are you using to track your results?
How will you test, measure and report your results?
Who are your internal audiences?

External Assessment

Competition

Who is your direct competition?
What other substitutes exist beyond the direct competitors?
What are your competitor's messages to your target market?
What touchpoints are your competitors using?
What does your competition use to differentiate itself?
Where is your competition strongest and weakest?

External Trends

What are the projected shifts in enrollment rates and demographics - nationwide and in your state?
What are the recent changes in government regulations that will affect how you will compete?
What are the shifts in executive perspectives across the industry?
How can you capitalize on changes in technology?

Join our newsfeed for more tips and tricks on Higher Ed Marketing!

Understanding your Social Snapshot

Posted by Rhea Friesen on December 3, 2012

Social Snapshots serve as a baseline to help you establish a standing among peer institutions and measure any goals your institution has already agreed to. What?! Don't have one? Click here to order your own.

Keep in mind that this snapshot only provides information about one piece of the puzzle - Facebook. When you run an audit of your social media presence, you’ll want to take other tactics into account - Twitter or Pinterest, for example. You'll also want to take a look at your internal processes and procedures.

We've created a 7-Step Action Plan to grow and improve your social strategy through measuring performance.

Analyze what you have
Develop realistic goals
Develop strategy based on audience
Build audience
Test/refine content
Survey matriculants
Iterate

In today's post we are going to focus on step one, analyze what you have. Looking at your Social Snapshot (order one here, they're free so no excuses) we will introduce you to the key metrics as well as the story they are telling. Additionally we will reference ways to fix or improve what you have based on our industry-wide study on Facebook. Download the full report in this previous post.

While each metric will tell you more about the performance of your page, the first three you want to hone in on are Fans, Engagement per Fan, and Active Fan %, boxed in red above. The chart below is a guide based on enrollment size.

Now, let's look more in-depth on what these metrics really tell us.

Fans

Ultimately this is a measure of Reach, how many people have the potential to interact with your Facebook communications. If you find you are falling short in this area make sure you are integrating Facebook communications with your entire campaign, on- and off-line. Changing your content and frequency of posting can also enhance your Reach, but you must look at other metrics to determine how this change should take place.

Engagement per Fan

One of the most discussed metrics in our industry, but the calculation varies somewhat depending on the source. Here we are looking at the number of comments, likes, comment likes, and wall posts divided by the Fan count of the page. Simply put this is the average number of times a Fan interacts with your page in a year. In order to improve this you must produce content your audience will react to. Look at what posts are getting the most responses and adjust your content strategy around them. Also asking questions or specifically asking for a response can increase a post's engagement.

Active Fan %

Personally I find this to be one of the most telling social metrics in our industry, however it is widely underused. This tells us how many of your Fans have interacted with your page over the past year. It varies slightly depending on your school's size, but most institutions should be getting about a third of their audience to interact with them. In order to make the best strategic changes, you must also look at the demographic makeup of your Facebook page as well as the overall character and personality of your school.

I often see institutions with a very high Engagement per Fan and a low Active Fan %. This means the page has a relatively small number of people interacting a lot. Usually this happens when the strategist finds a topic that gets a high response and stays inside that topic without expanding to topics other audience members would respond to. While it is important to maintain a high engagement, a social strategy must account for the entire audience they are reaching. Just as a diverse campus builds a strong institution a diverse Fan page creates a healthy and well-rounded experience.

Look for my next post to learn more! Also, please sign-up for our newsfeed in order to receive more information on Social Media and Higher Education Marketing.

How does your school rank on Facebook?

Posted by Talmadge Boyd on October 1, 2012

Recently we analyzed over 500 non-profit, four year, public and private institutions to answer three simple questions from our clients: What’s considered good in Facebook engagement? How am I doing against my peers? How do I improve?

To answer their questions, we produced our latest study “How Does Your School Rank on Facebook.” Download the full report.

We initially turned to tools like www.edgeranktracker.com but found that the industry summary reports did not provide the level of granularity needed to answer our clients questions. We’ve found that schools of different enrollment sizes often have very different needs.

So, we decided to run our own study with a particular focus on helping our clients improve their engagement. Out of our work, we were able to create a ranking system to guide individual school progress as well as develop some lessons from the data.

Below, you’ll find some of the high level findings and lessons learned that are contained in the full report.

Lessons Learned

Through a quantitative analysis of over 500 higher education institutions we are able to determine a clear social media ranking system that allows us to quickly identify how any school is doing relative to similarly sized institutions. In this process, we pulled out the ten leaders and ten low performers for each segment. We then used these groups to establish a qualitative and quantitative analysis of their post frequency, content and messaging. This process allows us to establish actionable practices for institutions of any size.

In this study, we discovered an ideal posting frequency of one to three posts per day and that too many posts can work against an institution. We also identified that there are distinct differences between school size and the type of content they should produce. Most larger and some medium sized schools can utilize their sports teams, but smaller institutions benefit most from posts that focus on Student Life and highlight successful alumni, students and faculty.

We also found that the tone, voice and approach of messaging play a strong role in fan engagement. After reviewing our initial findings we pinpointed posts with identical content, which had drastically different engagement. While we concede here that every school is different, it is apparent that having an engaging tone and messaging can drastically change the response a post receives.

Larger schools benefit from promoting sports and student life
Medium and small schools benefit from posts about student life
Very small schools benefit from promoting personal highlights
The way content is communicated affects response. Simply delivering an article isn’t enough. Schools must add flavor to posts.
Schools must pay attention to what creates a response to hone their messaging.

How Does Your School Stack Up?

Large schools (>10,000)

Average fans: 30,871
Average engagement per fan: .63
Active fan %: 20.75%

Medium schools (3,000 -9,999)

Average fans: 5482
Average engagement: .77
Active fan %: 25.68%

Small (1,000 – 2,999)

Average fans: 3283
Average engagement: .70
Active fan %: 23.22%

Very Small ( < 999)

Average fans: 1458
Average engagement: .66
Active fan %: 22.53%

Want the Full Report?
Download the complete report for more information about the study.

How to Improve Yield with Social Media

Posted by Tammy Young on February 23, 2012

As spring break rolls around it is time to start thinking about our yield activities. I know most of you already have activities in place, but are you using social media to help with your engagement with admitted and deposited students? If not you should be. Here are some quick tips to help you get started with your incoming class.

1) Choose Your Tools

Select your social tool of choice, I like Facebook Groups, include your social site in all of your admissions and orientation program materials. Begin promoting it via your main website, admissions counselors and other staff members. Don’t spend time stressing about the site too much. I don’t know of any students who declined admission because of the college’s social media strategy. The point is to get started and tweak your strategy as you learn.

2) Be Fun!

The 80/20 rule applies: 80% of the time the postings should be fun and casual to engage student and 20% should be institutional information. Too much institutional information will not help engage, and possibly disengage your students.

3) Dedicate a Responder

Use designated responders to help communicate your messages. Find people who are comfortable communicating with student in the social arena. I suggest using staff from all incoming touch points if you can find them, admissions, financial aid, housing, academic advising, orientation, and faculty. The key here is to respond to a posting within 24 hours.

4) Make Friends

Use the site to encourage your admits to meet the incoming class and make friends. Send this message immediately following their acceptance (and if it is too late this year, use the financial aid award packaging notification). You can do this via email and calls to action in your admitted student portal and the sites on your website that incoming students frequently visit.

5) Be Relevant to Students

Create your discussions around common topics that incoming students think about, housing choices, roommates, orientation, etc. Again, the key here is to establish your social site as a hub of activity and resource for students looking for campus engagement. Promote off-line events to create face to face relationships.

6) Have Student’s Facilitate

Recruit current students to help facilitate the discussions. It is best not to have staff dominate the discussions. Empower your students to drive the comments and interactions. View this as a social opportunity not just another communication channel. Let your students try to talk to each other first and answer each other’s questions. My rule of thumb is to try and wait 24 hours before jumping in with official information. By allowing the students to answer, you are enabling them to bond and make friends.

I hope these few tips help you create a casual and comfortable online community engagement for your students. Best wishes for a successful Class of 2016 and begin working on 2017!

[INFOGRAPHIC] Why Higher Education Can’t Ignore G+

Category Archives: Resources