Social media in higher education can help extend your school’s branding to potential students. It can help build your school’s online presence and connect with prospects in a more meaningful way.
This means that the content you share on social media should support your school’s digital marketing goals. You need to find ways to make your social media strategy match your school’s mission and values.
There are many benefits that higher education institutions can gain by understanding and using social media tools. Some of the top advantages of social media in higher education are discussed below.
1. Promote values and achievements
It is important that your school’s mission and values are widely known. Social media use by colleges and universities is significant in shaping the environment on campus. By promoting and representing the culture that your school is trying to create, you can help make it a reality.
Values should be aligned with everything from small purchases to major life decisions. Prospective students, faculty, and partners should be made aware that they are welcome and supported. In addition, the types of behavior that will not be tolerated should be communicated.
Broadcasting commitments to sustainability, investing in the community, and making advances in medical research are all reasons to give current and past scholars reasons to take pride in their Alma mater.
2. Connect with alumni and boost fundraising efforts
Alumni are often a school’s biggest donors, so it’s important to stay connected with them through social media. Universities usually have social media accounts specifically for alumni relations.
Social media is an important tool to publicize one-off or annual fundraising events. Social fundraising campaigns also allow alumni, students, staff, and faculty to be active promoters for the school. They can give an invaluable display of support and unity.
Include Customer Relations Manager (CRM) software to facilitate tracking contributions, both to attribute those contributions and calculate ROI.
3. Develop new learning opportunities
Social media can be a great tool for college students to use to express their creativity and present their ideas and provide staff an opportunity to interact with them.
4. Share important updates in real time
Institutions should have a plan for crises or emergencies even though no one wants them to happen. People look to social media for updates and information in real-time, so social media is a key part of every crisis communications plan.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has made it necessary for universities and colleges to have clear and concise communication with their students. This includes issuing advisories on social media about things like face mask policies, physical distancing requirements, and event cancellations.
People expect institutions to respond to social movements by taking concrete actions to address social or institutional issues.
Emergency communication plans should be created for weather disruptions, natural disasters, and other imminent threats.
5. Engage students on and off-campus
Not all students live on campus, but that doesn’t mean that they are any less motivated to engage and participate in student life.
A key advantage of social media in higher education is that it allows students to connect with each other. That might be from home, different campuses, work study programs, or at a conference.
Designate specific channels and groups for different purposes, such as sharing information and updates, seeking advice, and networking. Creating channels and groups based on various topics, interests, experiences, and activities will allow you to communicate with students more effectively. Assigning specific channels and groups for different purposes will enable you to manage the information you share more efficiently.
Create a Facebook page that is specifically for students who do not live on campus. This makes sure that they feel like they are a part of the university community just as much as those students who do live on campus.
Focusing Social Media on Your Schools Goals
It’s important to have a social media plan that aligns with your organization’s goals, or else your posts will just be noise on the internet with little accomplished. If you’re looking to increase enrollment, drive website traffic, or distinguish your programs from other schools, here are some key ways to focus your social media strategy on your school’s goals:
1. Alignment with your school’s marketing goals
What do you want to achieve by using social media? Increasing followers, visits, or your school’s reputation? Having a clear goal in mind will help you create a social media strategy.
It’s important for your school’s social media goals to reflect its broader goals. Defining your school’s brand is the first step to making sure its social media goals align with the rest of its digital marketing strategy. Consider your audience, your school’s unique selling points, and the bigger educational landscape when creating school social media posts.
Asking yourself what each post is trying to achieve will help you develop a more focused social media strategy.
2. Find a consistent voice for your school’s channels
Your school’s social media platforms should have a consistent tone that reflects the school’s mission and overall identity. Your school’s social media presence is an important part of its brand.
The content of your website should match the values and goals of your institution. If you want to appeal to business students, make sure the content is professional and academic. If you want to attract students who are looking for a specific career, feature success stories from students and alumni who have used your school to achieve their goals.
The school’s social media channels regularly feature content on industry news and relevant research it performs. This type of content not only supports the school’s identity as a leader in specific research and academic fields, but also attracts prospective students to the high caliber of education.
The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) has established itself as “The University for Creative Careers.” Its social media posts are fun, colorful, and visually appealing. The posts are primarily intended to demonstrate the artistic success of SCAD students. Other colleges may focus on other fields, such as medicine, law, accounting, or any of a number of other arenas, while still other institutions may maintain social media campaigns in a number of focused areas of study.
It is crucial to keep in mind that potential students will research their prospective colleges on social media. With that in mind, consider how you can use social media to accurately reflect the character of your school and its student body.
3. Develop a social media strategy
There is a strategy driving every successful social media channel. With more channels comes more strategies and more challenges. Creating a strategy for a multi-channel organization is a huge challenge.
Creating the social media marketing strategy and establishing their objectives are top priorities for your staff. Another priority for them is to coordinate that social strategy campus-wide.
The social media strategy of the university should be aligned with the university’s core objectives. This would create a clear business case for social media and allow managers to better allocate resources. In fact, 64% of professionals agree that social media should be connected to the strategic plan and institutional mission.
For example, Georgia State University’s #TheStateWay campaign has four pillars: Atlanta, research, classroom technology, and student success.
Meanwhile, the University of Sydney uses social media to support its 4 big strategic goals:
- enhance its research reputation
- attract high-quality students
- diversify its international student base
- build a unique brand
4. Establish social media guidelines and policies
There are a lot of people and accounts involved in this, so it’s important to have guidelines and policies to keep everyone organized. Having good documentation can help with on-boarding new people, promote best practices, and help keep everyone using the same language across channels.
Your complete set of higher education social media guidelines should include:
- A social media style guide
- Guidelines for dealing with negative messages
- A crisis communications and emergency management plan
- Creating social media policies
- Contact information for relevant members of the social team
- Links to social media training opportunities
- Mental health resources for social media staff
Although it may appear to be a lot of material to cover, having comprehensive guidelines is essential to social media managers. Furthermore, it enables students and faculty to be involved in a genuine and autonomous way. Additionally, it decreases the reliance on the support of the primary team.
5. Appeal to prospects with unique platform features in your social media
Even though it is important to be consistent, you also want your content to be as exciting as possible. Social media provides a great opportunity for you to be innovative with the way you present information, use visuals, interact with users, and follow online trends.
To improve your school’s social media presence, take advantage of all the features and tools that platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer. Many of these features are perfectly suited for the kind of content your school should be producing, and using them is a great way to get more people interested in your school.
There are many ways that social media can be used by universities. For example, Instagram Live can be used for Q&As from students or professors. Facebook Events can be used to promote upcoming open days or other activities on your campus. Twitter Polls can be used to engage with prospective students and get their input on the kind of content they want to see from your school.
Instagram Reels and Highlights are attractive to prospects because they offer information in an easily digestible format. If you’re looking for a way to reach out to potential students and show them what your school has to offer, TikTok is a great platform to use. Short videos that give a behind-the-scenes look at your school, like tours and student interviews, are especially effective in catching people’s interest.
Social media should be used as a recruitment tool in higher education. Since many prospective students look at the social media presence of the schools they’re considering, it’s important to address that interest.
6. Build and empower communities
If you want your social media communities to thrive, you need a central hub, some guidelines, and a strategy.
Develop an online program that is accessible to students and faculty so they can apply to create and manage accounts. Let the students’ creativity shine through – it will be beneficial in the end.
City University of New York has given its TikTok account to students. This is definitely not what you would find on most official higher education social platforms. However, it has more than 23 thousand followers and 1.6 million likes.
Colorado State University has created a student-run YouTube channel where student ambassadors share intimate videos about life on campus and what it is like to be a college student during a pandemic.
If more people at your school share content, then your school will have a greater social media reach and more people will see your school’s content. Hootsuite Amplify is a tool that lets faculty, staff, and students share content that has been approved by your school, so that your school’s social media presence will increase.
7. Invest in building a team
A successful social media for higher education program cannot be run by a single person, nor should it be left to interns. However, it can be beneficial to have student interns or work placement positions on your social media team.
The University of Michigan has a social media team composed of 12 people, including a director and student interns. West Virginia University has a social media team of eight people who work full-time, plus three half-time student workers.
If you don’t have a full team yet, try forming strategic alliances with other departments. This way, you’ll have access to more information and resources than if you tried to do everything on your own.
You can use a social media management platform like Hootsuite to make the most of a small team. You can create posts in advance and schedule them for the best posting times. You can also upload batches of posts in bulk. This way you don’t waste time logging in and out of different platforms.
8. Measure and revisit your social media strategy
The goal of a social media strategy for schools is to improve communication and connection with the school community, and to better promote the school and its events. Tactics should be designed to increase engagement with target audiences, and should be regularly evaluated to ensure they are still effective.
To achieve your school’s goals, you need to understand which of your efforts are most effective and which areas you need to improve. You can tell how well your social media content is performing by looking at indicators such as post engagement rates, traffic, account mentions, and click-through rates.
A self-assessment of your social media presence can help you determine how well your current social media efforts align with your overall marketing goals. Additionally, this exercise can help you pinpoint ways that you can use your content more effectively to achieve better results.
Social media is now an essential part of achieving your school’s goals, no matter what they are. By engaging with users on popular digital platforms, you bring your brand and its offerings to them, which proactively helps you reach your goals.
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