Information in this blog post was obtained from Hootsuite, Modern Campus, Pew Research Center and TargetX.
As more and more businesses realize the importance of social media to promote their brand and engage their customers, colleges and universities should not only follow suit but lead the way.
Universities cater to a wide variety of audiences and social media marketing can help reach them in ways that traditional marketing might not.
Higher education is certainly no stranger to marketing: commercials, billboards, and digital ads promoting a university or one of its programs is a common sight, not to mention their seemingly endless supply of print materials.
Prospective students are inundated with marketing materials – postcards, viewbooks, course catalogs, email after email – but are they engaged? Are they convinced? Are they actually ready to “apply now?”
Let’s take a look at why utilizing the power of social media is a necessity for higher education marketing.
Direct Access
Social media offers higher education institutions a coveted marketing opportunity – direct access to many of their target audience. This direct access creates several potential uses for many different audiences.
Need to target young, prospective students? A TikTok video or Instagram story might pique their interest. How about notifying their parents of important deadlines? An informative post on Facebook could be the way to go.
Once these audiences engage with a universities’ social media channels, it creates a high degree of valuable face time – keeping your brand ever-present.
Modern Campus points out three other key uses of social media for colleges and universities:
Use as a recruitment tool.
A quick way to distribute information.
Directly engage audiences.
Use as a Recruitment Tool
A 2022 study on teens’ social media and technology habits by the Pew Research Center reveals that 97% of teens use the internet at least once a day. With 98% of 15 to 17-year-olds having access to smartphones.
A key target audience for higher education is prospective students – for on-campus that particularly includes traditional-aged incoming freshmen. With such a large percentage of teenagers accessing the internet daily from their smartphones, the opportunity to connect with potential students is literally in their hands.
Social media platforms allow universities to attract students by showing what they have to offer in and outside of the classroom. Whether by highlighting a virtual tour, social opportunities, athletic events, or academic programs (ideally all of those,) use social media to show potential students what your institution is all about.
According to Hootsuite, 73% of aspiring students utilize social media to research potential schools. Give them a reason to attend yours. As an added bonus, you don’t have to worry about your recruitment pieces immediately becoming out of a date, which can often happen with printed materials.
Social media’s reach is far greater than just prospective students, so be sure to reach those other target audiences.
A Quick Way to Distribute Information
Social media channels can be the perfect place to publish up-to-date information as soon as it happens.
Promoting upcoming events or guest speakers is a great way to increase attendance as well as to establish or reinforce your brand. Is your institution trying to stimulate a particular community? Great! Social media marketing can help get the word out and strengthen sentiment towards that community (and your institution.)
Take advantage of real-time notifications when unexpected changes occur. Used appropriately, even relatively mundane but important notices, such as weather closures, become marketing opportunities.
With its large, diverse reach you can send your message to many different populations at once, but social media doesn’t just allow you to talk to your audiences – it allows you to listen.
Directly Engage Audiences
Unlike traditional marketing materials, the social aspect of social media allows you to truly engage with your audiences.
Through activities such as polls and contests, among others, you can easily and immediately get direct feedback. Many of the tools you need for engaging your audience are already built into social media platforms.
How many times have you sent a direct mail piece and simply waited for them to take action? That’s not engagement, that’s being left on read (if you’re even that lucky.)
The value of the feedback is proportionate to the emphasis you place on it, so be sure to have a strategy in place. For instance, feedback will not always be positive (this is the internet after all) so it’s important to plan for those situations and deal with it in a way that builds relationships instead of alienates your audiences.
Remember that feedback is a two-way street, be sure to keep lines of communication open. If you’re asked an important question and never respond, that will likely create negative sentiment you can’t recover from.
Foster engagement of your followers with each other by creating ways for them to actively participate, such as groups, communities or established hashtags. Once they get started, your audiences can build engaging content for you. Of course, it will be vital to monitor and help guide the narrative.
With social media’s pervasiveness and continual evolution, opportunities for engagement are limited only by your imagination, planning and follow-through.
Not only does social media marketing allow you to engage with your audiences, but it also allows you to measure that engagement.
Measure Engagement
Using built-in or bolt-on analytics tools, social media engagement can be tracked and measured – an important step to ensure your marketing dollars are being used wisely.
Many platforms offer a variety of statistics, which enable you to define the engagement that best fits your institution – whether by likes, comments, traffic, or something else.
The use of these analytic tools often requires less planning than tracking through traditional marketing. Have you ever scrambled last minute because a QR code being sent out was using a URL you couldn’t track?
You’ll also have the opportunity to gain insight into other valuable audience data through the provided information. Data is one of a marketer’s best assets, take advantage of it.
An often-used engagement metric, one easily measured, is increased traffic to your website.
Drive Traffic
A university’s website is the largest (and most complex) marketing tool they possess, and continually driving traffic is an important evergreen goal.
According to a 2020 digital admissions study from TargetX, 54% of survey respondents said, “a college’s website was very or extremely important in their decision about whether to apply.”
While social media plays an important role in distributing information, you will inevitably need to send users to the website for more details or the next steps.
Not only can social media help drive traffic to the website, but it can strategically drive traffic. You might need to call out specific information, such as financial aid deadlines or changes to the core curriculum – with social media you can easily do so while minimizing the website’s complexity.
Social media marketing offers many channels and opportunities to increase traffic to your website.
Change the Channel
The wide variety of social media channels allows universities to target audiences where they most frequent, and to adjust strategies if they’re not working.
In stark contrast to their 2014-15 study, Pew Research Center’s 2022 study found that teenagers’ usage of Facebook dropped dramatically from 71% to 32%. If your institution was still heavily reliant on Facebook to reach prospective students, you would be missing the mark.
Much like Facebook’s decline, TikTok’s meteoric rise in the past few years created the need for universities to take a serious look at the platform.
While analytics data can provide some insights, it’s important to stay on top of overall social media usage and its platform shifts. If you don’t know what application your audience is using, you simply cannot market to them.
Using a consistent voice across social media channels is important to create a cohesive brand; however, you should tailor messages to your audiences within those channels. A message written for a parent will likely not resonate with a 17-year-old. The same is true for a traditional-aged prospective student versus a non-traditional or even a transfer student.
Despite an ever-increasing number and their continual propensity to become far too similar, most of your audiences will use the most popular social media platforms – make sure you are as well.
Seven Reasons Why
There are many reasons why social media marketing is important for higher education and by now you should have a good understanding of several of those, but let’s recap.
This post covered seven reasons why social media marketing is important to colleges and universities:
Direct access to audiences
Use as a recruitment tool
An efficient way to distribute information
Direct engagement
Measurable engagement
Increased website traffic
Multi-channel reach
With those seven reasons, I hope you now have a clear understanding why social media marketing is so important for higher education. In the next article, we will look more closely into how colleges and universities can create and employ a social media strategy to take advantage of these opportunities.
Resources
McLachlan, Stacey. (2022, December 15). Social Media in Higher Education: 13 Essential Tips. Hootsuite. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-in-higher-education/
Modern Campus. (2021, February 15.) Social Media Marketing for Colleges and Universities: 8 Tips. Modern Campus. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://moderncampus.com/blog/social-media-strategy-for-colleges-and-universities.html
Vogels, Emily A; Gelles-Watnick, Risa; Massarat, Navid. (2022, August 10.) Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022. Pew Research Center. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/
mStoner and TargetX. (2022). 2020 Digital Admissions – How Prospective Students Use Online Tools for College Research and Choice (PDF whitepaper). TargetX. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://www.targetx.com/higher-ed-insights/research/digital-admissions/