Information in this blog post was obtained from Hootsuite, Search Engine Journal, and Sprout Social.
Now that you understand the importance of social media marketing for higher education, it’s time to create a strategy for your university or college.
Whether you’re starting from scratch, or refocusing your efforts, creating a social media marketing strategy can seem daunting – but it doesn’t have to be. We’ll break down several key steps for successful planning and implementation.
1. Define Your Audience
Defining your audiences is an important first step so you can tailor messages to the specific interests and needs of each group. If you don’t have a clear understanding of who you’re messaging, it won’t matter what you’re saying.
Higher education generally has several key groups of audiences to consider. At a high level these can include:
students
families
employees (faculty and staff)
alumni
donors
external audiences
Each of these groups can, and should, be broken down further.
Since the majority of collegiate social marketing efforts focus on students – rightfully so – they will most likely be the main focus group. However, “students” is too broad and needs further segmentation.
Within the high-level student group, there are various subgroups to consider, such as:
prospective, current, or former
domestic or international
in-state or out-of-state
on-campus or online
traditional, nontraditional and/or military
undergraduate or postgraduate
Of course, even these can be broken down further, giving you the ability to get very hyper focused. For instance, you might find a particular need to target nontraditional, domestic, online prospective graduate students from neighboring states who have been admitted but not enrolled – whew, say that five times fast.
This hyper-focused segmentation is great for email campaigns or paid marketing but can lead to alienating audiences on social media.
Unless you’re using the paid side of social media, such as boosting a post, it would be better to create target audiences based on only a few of your possible segmentations. For starters, try out a combination of three, such as 1) current 2) on-campus 3) students. Evaluate the success of the message through your metrics and goals, which we will discuss shortly, and continue to refine the audience to meet your needs.
Consider setting up personas to humanize and keep track of your defined audiences. Just remember that personas should be based on real data, so be sure to utilize the various sources of information at your disposal, such as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms or student information systems (SIS). An effective social media marketing strategy will require a lot of collaboration throughout the university, so don’t be shy about asking other departments for data.
Keep your audiences in mind with every post you create – tailor each message to their interests and needs and utilize available metrics to determine if the post met its intended goal.
2. Define Your Metrics
It’s not enough to simply know who your audience is, you need to able to measure their interaction with your content. Luckily, most social media platforms have a variety of available metrics…a lot of available metrics.
With so many metrics at your disposal, it’s important to really focus on the ones that make sense for your organization. Vanity metrics like follower count and views might provide some value when reporting to the c-suite but won’t necessarily help you hone your messaging and goal completion.
The metrics you choose to focus on will vary depending on your goal and the type of content. For brand awareness, post reach and audience growth rate could be your go-to metrics. If you’re trying out new video content, video views and video completion might be the most important to you.
Depending on your needs, you can utilize metrics within social media platforms or take advantage of additional analytics and reporting tools. Much like the audience, be sure the metrics you focus on are valuable in measuring your goals.
3. Define Your Goals
Like all marketing efforts, social media marketing should be used to accomplish brand goals and objectives. Maintaining social media accounts “just because” is likely a waste of time and effort.
Create SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound – to evaluate the success of content.
Your social media marketing goals should be created in support of your overall marketing goals, which helps define the specifics of each. Your chosen metrics will be used for measurement. Make sure the goal is attainable, not some far-off future state, and is relevant to your institution. Finally, ensure the goal can be completed within a reasonable amount of time.
Defining goals can often be one of the hardest parts of any strategy but is an essential step to measure success. An easier, but more tedious step is assessing your current and past social media content.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana, Spanish philosopher
4. Define Your Content
Creating an audit of your social media content is an important step to ensure you know what you’ve already posted and how well it performed. Even if you’re starting from scratch don’t skip this step – you will need it later.
Create a spreadsheet (we love our spreadsheets) to keep track of important, common post elements such as:
title (or intent)
content (or description)
date / time
platform(s)
screenshot
audience
metrics
goal
call to action
You don’t need to include every detail, the information you collect should be relevant to your specific needs. It also doesn’t make sense to go through your entire post history, decide how far you want to look back for your organization.
Not only will the content audit serve as an important tool to understand the past but can be used as a planning template for the future.
5. Define Your Schedule
Your newly created content audit will help you know what to post, but you’ll also need to know when and how often to post. Creating a social media calendar will help you track and plan your content.
While it does vary by channel and there is not an agreed upon standard, 2022 analysis of Sprout Social data indicates the overall best time to post is 9-10 a.m. CST Tuesday through Thursday. Using available information, such as Sprout Social’s analysis, is important as a baseline but it’s even more important to analyze your own metrics to see your audience’s specific behavior.
The recommended frequency of posts also varies across channels but is usually at least once per day on every channel, with several platforms recommended to have multiple per day. This is certainly a lot of content, so be sure the frequency makes sense for your college or university. Remember that consistent quality content is key.
The social media calendar will help you plan for upcoming dates (holidays, graduation, etc.) and allow you to see content droughts throughout the year. Your university’s main social media accounts may be the primary focus, but there are most likely several other accounts and departments you’ll want to work closely with.
6. Define Your Collaboration
Higher education institutions often have multitudes of departments wanting to create their own social media content – this is certainly a double-edged sword.
On one hand, there are ample brand-related posts for a variety of audiences, which helps keep content fresh. On the other, there are more chances to make mistakes or harm your brand.
Trying to control the entirety of a university’s social media is a losing game – it will be nearly impossible to support and invariably there will be rogue accounts. Creating a collaborative environment will better serve your sanity and the institution.
Define brand standards, create simple dos and don’ts, share audience segments, and encourage cross-posting. Leverage the unique mindset of different departments. If you find more fine-grained control is needed, establish a workflow or approval process others are willing to buy into.
Remember you’re all part of the same team, and ultimately have similar goals. With several new or improved plans in place, your social media marketing strategy should be taking shape – it’s time to start posting!
7. Define Your Redefinability
As your planned posts go out, it’s important to continually evaluate them. Are they meeting your goals? Are you using the correct metrics? Are your target audiences correct? Are you using the right platforms at the right times?
If things aren’t working – change them. It’s important to have a plan, but be nimble enough to adjust, otherwise it’s simply planned failure.
However, don’t make drastic changes too hastily. Your strategy’s implementation needs time to mature, and you’ll want to have ample data to support it. Schedule time periods throughout the year to examine your strategy and performance to make large-scale changes as needed.
In the interim, don’t be afraid to experiment. Try small changes such as adjusting post times or calls to action. Analyze your metrics to see if these changes improved your goals. Small improvements add up.
To recap, the seven steps you should take to implement a social media marketing strategy for higher education include, defining your:
audience
metrics
goals
content
schedule
collaboration
redefinability
After you’ve gone through each of these steps, you should have a solid plan in place, which will provide a great foundation to keep building and improving your social media marketing efforts.
Resources
Newberry, Christina; Wood, Amanda. (2022, October 18). How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 9 Easy Steps. Hootsuite. Retrieved April 16, 2023, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/
Newberry, Christina. (2022, June 23). 16 Key Social Media Metrics to Track in 2023. Hootsuite. Retrieved April 16, 2023, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-metrics/
Frederick, Brian. (2023, January 4). How To Create a Social Media Strategy In 9 Steps. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved April 16, 2023, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-create-social-media-strategy/474969/
Keutelian, Mary. (2022, July 29). The best times to post on social media in 2022. Sprout Social. Retrieved April 16, 2023, from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/
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