Knowing the importance of social media marketing for higher education and how to implement a strategy are necessary organizational steps but, eventually, action is required to put that strategy in place. Regardless of the industry type, creating a social media marketing strategy can be a huge undertaking but with ever-evolving artificial intelligence (AI) tools at our fingertips, we can get help from an unlikely source.
Utilizing ChatGPT, we’ll go through the process of creating an actionable strategy for a college or university.
Audience Personas
One of the first steps in creating a social media marketing strategy is defining your audience. Although there are many audience segments that could be used for higher education, a university’s central marketing efforts might best be spent on prospective students and their influencers – mom and dad.
With that in mind, we will create personas for:
traditional-aged prospective college students
their parents
traditional-aged prospective graduate college students
nontraditional-aged prospective online college students
Within ChatGPT write a prompt for each of the target personas, simply replace the defining characteristics. The prompt will look something like “Create a persona for a traditional-aged prospective college student.”
Using our adjusted prompt each time, we now have four robust target personas, each with:
name
demographic information
background
goals
challenges
personality traits
As an added bonus, you can utilize AI image creation tools to create an image for each persona – although I’ve skipped that step for now, since these will not have visual representations.
An example of our newly created personas:
Name (segment)
Sarah (traditional-aged prospective college students)
Demographic Information
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Family income: $75,000 - $100,000
Background
Currently a high school senior
Lives with parents and younger sibling
Has taken Advanced Placement (AP) classes and participated in extracurricular activities
Interested in pursuing a degree in psychology or social work
Has visited several college campuses and attended college fairs
Goals and Motivations
Wants to attend a college that offers a strong psychology or social work program
Interested in a school that provides opportunities for internships and community service
Wants to attend a school that is a good fit socially and academically
Looking for a school that is affordable and offers financial aid options
Challenges
Overwhelmed by the college application process
Uncertain about how to choose the right college
Concerned about the cost of attending college
Struggling to balance academics and extracurricular activities
Personality Traits
Hardworking
Responsible
Compassionate
Curious
Socially outgoing
Key Takeaways
Sarah is a high-achieving high school student who is interested in pursuing a career in psychology or social work.
She is looking for a college that offers strong academic programs in her field of interest, as well as opportunities for internships and community service.
She is concerned about the cost of attending college and is looking for financial aid options.
She is looking for a college that is a good fit socially and academically.
Even though the same prompt was used for each persona, the information and layout were not consistent (I’m looking at you prospective graduate student Alex); however, you can explicitly specify what you need and use Markdown for formatting.
Remember that personas should be based on your institution’s own data, but these will help you get started. Next step: defining goals.
Goals
Creating SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals is an important next step because it ultimately defines why your university is doing this!
With our newly available personas, ChatGPT can generate a SMART goal for each. Unfortunately, chained prompting did not seem to retain persona information, so a prompt was created for each of our audience segments: “Create a SMART goal for a higher education social media strategy targeted to nontraditional-aged prospective online college students.”
With the help of ChatGPT, we now have a SMART goal for each of our personas, here is Lisa's:
Specific: Increase the number of inquiries and applications from nontraditional students like Emily for the college's online degree programs by creating and sharing more targeted and accessible social media content.
Measurable: Increase the number of inquiries and applications for the college's online degree programs by 25% over the next six months, as compared to the previous six months.
Achievable: By conducting research on the types of content that nontraditional students like Emily find engaging, and by leveraging tools like chatbots, testimonials, and Q&A sessions, we can create more targeted and accessible content that addresses their concerns and encourages them to consider our online degree programs.
Relevant: Increasing enrollment in online degree programs is a key priority for the college, as it can help reach a broader audience, generate revenue, and support overall enrollment and retention goals.
Time-bound: This goal will be achieved over the next six months, with progress measured and tracked on a monthly basis.
Again, these should only be used as a starting point for your own institution’s goals. You might want to specify your own time-bound information within your prompt (apparently all of these are simply six-month goals).
With SMART goals in place for each persona, let’s have ChatGPT give us content ideas.
Content Ideas
While “Content is King” is potentially a problematic idiom in 2023, the message still rings true – content is everything. Luckily, ChatGPT can be utilized for our needs once again.
Your content will vary depending on your college (are you sensing a theme here?) but we can use the specifics of each generated persona’s goals for content ideas.
For our prospective graduate student, Alex, the specific aspect of the goal is “Increase awareness and interest among traditional-aged recent college graduate students in the college's graduate programs by creating and sharing social media content that highlights the value, relevance, and impact of these programs.”
Well, what kind of content highlights the value, relevance and impact of these programs? Let’s ask our friendly not-so-neighborhood AI: “What kind of social media content should be used that highlights the value, relevance, and impact of a university's graduate programs?”
Rinse and repeat.
ChatGPT created these content ideas for Alex:
To highlight the value, relevance, and impact of a university's graduate programs on social media, here are some content ideas:
Share success stories Share stories of graduate students who have achieved success and career advancement after completing their degree programs. Include testimonials and interviews with alumni to showcase the value of the university's graduate programs.
Highlight research and innovation Share information about cutting-edge research and innovative projects being conducted by graduate students and faculty. Highlight how these initiatives are making a real-world impact and how they are relevant to current issues and challenges.
Showcase industry partnerships and collaborations Highlight partnerships and collaborations with industry leaders and organizations. Share stories of how graduate students and faculty are working together with industry partners to tackle real-world challenges and create meaningful impact.
Share information about faculty expertise Share information about the expertise of the graduate program faculty, including their research and professional accomplishments, awards, and recognitions. Highlight how their expertise is relevant and valuable to graduate students.
Interactive content Create interactive content, such as live Q&A sessions with graduate program faculty or webinars featuring industry experts, to engage prospective students and highlight the relevance and value of the graduate programs.
Some of the suggested content is more realistic and relevant than others but gives you a great place to start. With new content ideas in mind, it’s worthwhile to look at your previous content.
Content Audit
Creating a social media content audit allows you to know what you’ve done in the past, how well it performed, and areas for improvement.
ChatGPT’s current limitation of accessing up-to-date webpages means it won’t be much help in filling out a content audit (although other platforms and web scraping tools can help with that) it certainly can help you decide what information to audit.
We’ll keep it simple here: “Create a template for a social media content audit.”
And just like that, we have a template we can use right away, or adjust to our needs. It even includes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis – now that’s helpful!
Social Media Content Audit Template
Platform
Date Range
Key Metrics
Reach
Engagement
Impressions
Click-throughs
Top-performing content
Content Types
Text Posts
Total
Top-performing
Lowest-performing
Images, Videos, Links
Total
Top-performing
Lowest-performing
Content Analysis
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Recommendations
Content types to focus on
Content types to reduce or eliminate
Suggestions for improving engagement
Ideas for new content
Best practices to consider
Next Steps
Action items
Timeline
Responsible party
Follow-up plan
At least you have a basic idea of what you might need to gather; now let’s get some content out there.
Scheduling Content
While you certainly can use ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate content, this is a good time in the process to create your own, institutional-specific content. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t lean on AI to create a schedule with sample content ideas.
Focusing on the parental persona, David, we ask ChatGPT to create a schedule to follow based on the persona and its SMART goals. “Create a schedule of social media posts on various platforms that provides relevant information and resources to support the parents of a traditional-age prospective college student's search and application process.”
And our sample schedule is ready to go:
Platform: Facebook
Date Range: May 1 - May 31
Frequency: 2 posts per week
May 3: Highlight the benefits of attending an open house or campus visit day, and provide a link to register for upcoming events.
May 10: Share tips for filling out the FAFSA, including deadlines and important information to have on hand.
May 17: Post a video testimonial from a current student and parent discussing the college search process and why they ultimately chose your institution.
May 24: Share a blog post outlining the differences between merit-based and need-based scholarships, and offer advice on how to find and apply for them.
May 31: Share a link to a virtual tour of campus, with a reminder that families can still get a feel for the college experience even if they can't visit in person.
Platform: Twitter
Date Range: May 1 - May 31
Frequency: 3 tweets per week
May 4: Share a statistic about the importance of campus visits in the college search process, and encourage parents to sign up for upcoming open house events.
May 18: Tweet a link to a blog post about the different types of college admissions tests, and offer advice on which one to choose.
May 25: Share a list of frequently asked questions about the financial aid process, and include a link to the FAFSA website.
Platform: Instagram
Date Range: May 1 - May 31
Frequency: 2 posts per week
May 7: Post a photo of campus with a caption that highlights the college's commitment to academic excellence and student success.
May 14: Share a series of Instagram stories featuring current students sharing their tips for staying organized during the college search process.
May 21: Post a carousel of photos featuring different areas of campus, and encourage parents to schedule a visit to experience it in person.
May 28: Share a quote graphic featuring advice from a college admissions expert on how to stand out in the application process.
Hopefully its usefulness in creating a schedule for you is clear.
At this point, we’ve taken advantage of AI to aid in the creation of:
personas
SMART goals
content ideas
content audit template creation
content scheduling
As mentioned throughout, use ChatGPT and other AI tools as a means of inspiration. While it can legitimately be used for every aspect of a social media marketing strategy (including content generation) you will know your higher education institution’s goals, branding, and voice better than a machine (for now).
Disclaimer: No AI was injured in the production of this content. AI (ChatGPT) was used as a tool to supplement, enhance, and make suggestions in writing this blog post.
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