How Social Listening Drives Communication and Enrollment Strategy
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This document discusses how social listening can be used to drive communication and enrollment strategies in higher education. It provides 5 strategic uses for social listening: 1) Crisis awareness and management, 2) Student and alumni engagement, 3) Brand development management, 4) Influencer identification, and 5) Audience and conversation analysis. For each use, it outlines how social listening insights can inform an institution's approach and provides examples. The overall message is that social listening is a valuable tool for higher education institutions to enhance their communication strategies, engagement, brand management, and market research.
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How Social Listening Drives Communication and Enrollment Strategy
- 1. How Social Listening Drives Communication Strategy How Social Listening Drives Communication & Enrollment Strategy Liz Gross, Ph.D. | @LizGross144 WAICU Admissions & PR/Marketing Spring Meeting March 4, 2019
- 2. 54%“A person like me” is a credible spokesperson @EdelmanPR | www.edelman.com/trust-barometer
- 3. Reputations are made and destroyed overnight, thanks to: • The power of online and social media • An emboldened public who has seen Twitter bring down corporate titans and foment social- political unrest around the world. Public perception has become reality Zach Olsen, Inside Higher Ed’s Call To Action Blog, August 30, 2017
- 4. The internet is real life
- 6. “Your president is on social even if they’re not on social” - Walter M. Kimbrough President, Dillard University
- 8. strategic social listening real life: transcribed, categorized, and analyzed to provide your institution with the insights it needs to support data-driven strategies
- 12. 5Strategic Uses for Social Listening in Higher Education
- 14. Modern reputation management means you can • Know about issues before your president or the press • Track the origin and spread of issues in real time • Quantify the size of an issue Crisis Awareness & Management
- 18. October 2013
- 20. An Example For Later A VP walks into a coffee shop at Duke and…. Read the full case study at info.campussonar.com/waicu
- 22. Modern customer service means • Meeting or exceeding response time expectations • Finding and responding to comments and complaints • Identifying patters in customer conversation to inform content strategy AKA Customer Service
- 23. of social media complainers are happy with response time Most Organizations Don’t Respond Fast Enough 32% of social media complainers expect a response within 1 hour 39% http://www.convinceandconvert.com/hug-your-haters/new-research-shows-how-fast-companies-have-to-be-in-social-
- 24. • Businesses only respond to 63% of social media complaints within 24 hours • Education is one of the least responsive industries on social media – responding to 7% of mentions • Average education response time is 9.9 hours. Most Organizations Don’t Respond Fast Enough http://www.convinceandconvert.com/hug-your-haters/new-research-shows-how-fast-companies-have-to-be-in-social- media/
- 25. Half Your Audience Thinks You Ignore Complaints Social Media Review Sites Boards/ Forums Expects a reply 42% 53% 47% Baer, J. Hug Your Haters. 2016
- 26. Not Finding and Responding To Complaints Hurts Brand Advocacy Social Media Review Sites Boards/ Forums Change in Advocacy: Answered Complaint + 20% + 16% + 25% Change in Advocacy: Unanswered Complaint - 43% - 37% - 38% Baer, J. Hug Your Haters. 2016
- 27. Social listening since 2014 • 2016: Special event limited campus parking • Student tweeted about (not at) the campus • Campus found it immediately, responded, offered solution: the campus mobile app • Downloads increased • Student deleted the negative tweet University Hugs A Hater Read more: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/call-action-marketing-and-communications-higher-education/social-listening-belongs-modern
- 28. Modern enrollment management professionals should seize engagement opportunities Proactive Engagement Opportunities • Requests for information • Decision points • Celebrate accomplishments
- 29. • Twitter • Instagram • Reddit • College Confidential • Blogs Common Sources of Engagement Opportunities
- 30. Reflecting On A Visit
- 31. Reflecting On A Visit
- 32. Reflecting On A Visit
- 33. Reflecting On A Visit
- 34. Reflecting On A Visit
- 35. Reflecting On A Visit
- 36. Reflecting On A Visit
- 38. En Route to Campus Visit
- 41. Find Engagement Opportunities On Your Own Read the how-to at info.campussonar.com/waicu
- 43. Modern brand managers need to understand the online conversation about their brand Brand Management • Share of Voice • Owned vs Earned • Brand Attribute Conversation
- 44. In a world driven by peer influence, how do you stack up to your competitors?
- 45. Share of Voice
- 46. Share of Voice
- 47. Tracking Share of Voice Identifies Competitive Insight With Strategic Implications
- 48. Is your content driving word of mouth? Are you creating the right content for your audience? Does their conversation look like yours?
- 49. Owned • Created by campus accounts and websites • Shares of this content by others Earned • Content about the campus • Social media accounts, journalists, blogs, forums • Conversations with campus social media accounts Owned vs Earned Conversation
- 50. • If you’re creating the right amount of content • If your content is resonating with your audience • If you’re losing or gaining influence on the conversation • What your audience wants you to be talking about • When your audience is most active online • How athletics impacts your brand conversation Owned/Earned can help you understand:
- 51. Alignment of owned and earned conversation themes is a measure of institutional influence.
- 53. We paid for brand research and a new brand campaign. Did it work?
- 54. Brand-Aligned Conversation The portion of your conversation that aligns with identified brand attributes Learn about brand attributes in action at Beloit College: info.campussonar.com/waicu
- 55. Brand-Aligned Conversation at Beloit College • Goal: Find out how 5 brand drivers are represented in conversation from and about Beloit College • Understand the impact of owned brand-aligned conversation on earned conversation • Identify opportunities for improvement
- 56. Identifying Brand-Aligned Conversation • Collect all conversation about the college • Build a taxonomy to identify how branded conversation might appear online (news, social media, etc.) • Categorize mentions that are brand-aligned by each brand driver – Some mentions may align with more than one brand driver • Manually review for accuracy
- 57. Brand Drivers in Online Conversation 13% 87% Branded Conversation Non-Branded Conversation 92% 85% 79% 87% 8% 15% 21% 13% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% September October November December
- 58. Brand-Aligned Conversation by Brand Driver 20% 12% 6% 6% 55% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
- 60. Owned vs Earned by Brand Driver 84% 93% 53% 79% 81% 16% 8% 47% 21% 19% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Owned Earned
- 61. Brand-Aligned Conversation Analysis • Content Creation Considerations • Social Media Strategy • Earned Media/Media Relations Approach
- 63. Modern organizations leverage influencers to: Influencers Build Trust • Improve brand advocacy • Expand brand awareness • Reach new target audiences • Increase share of voice
- 64. Advocates vs Influencers Advocates • Your biggest fans; cheer you on without prompting Influencers • People you choose to help you achieve goals because they: • Have the trust of their community/audience • Drive discussions around key topics • Answer the questions everyone is asking • Are highly engaged with their community
- 65. Gus Johnson, UW-Stout ‘18 • 422,000+ YouTube subscribers • Top videos have 3M+ views • 100,000+ views within a day on new videos • Subreddit with 6,000+ readers Missed Opportunities on Many Campuses Read the full story, and watch his videos: info.campussonar.com/waicu
- 66. Influencer Marketing for Recruitment • What is your target audience interested in? – Who talks about that? • What questions do prospects and families as about your school/programs? – Who answers them? • What current students have already amassed a niche audience?
- 67. Influencer Marketing for Fundraising • Highlight the results of alumni giving, and encourage a sense of ownership from alumni donors • Equip alumni with stories that resonate with their social networks • Increase the giving rate of young alumni • Increase philanthropic mindshare of alumni during end-of-year giving period
- 68. Find Influencer Opportunities with Social Listening A recent campus study found 50+ potential influencers, including: • A passionate transfer student with 7,000+ Twitter followers • A current student who writes for Teen Vogue • First-year student of color with 27K Twitter followers, 56K Instagram followers, and 259K YouTube subscribers – YouTube collaborator with another student • International student with 22K Twitter followers and 26K Instagram followers who publicly rates her campus 10/10
- 70. Modern market research must be Market Research • Fast • Flexible • Longitudinal • Quantifiable • Human
- 71. Augmenting Traditional Market Research What are some barriers to student success? • Academic literacy • Language • Educational background • Digital literacy • Personal finances • Work/school balance • Relationships outside of school • Sense of belonging on campus • Ability to connect with faculty • Mental health issues • Geographic location/transportation
- 72. Augmenting Traditional Market Research 800,000 online conversations about why students drop out
- 73. Augmenting Traditional Market Research What are some barriers to student success? • Academic literacy • Language • Educational background • Digital literacy • Personal finances • Work/school balance • Relationships outside of school • Sense of belonging on campus • Ability to connect with faculty • Mental health issues • Geographic location/transportation
- 74. Augmenting Traditional Market Research What are some barriers to student success? • Academic literacy • Language • Educational background • Digital literacy • Personal finances • Work/school balance • Relationships outside of school • Sense of belonging on campus • Ability to connect with faculty • Mental health issues • Geographic location/transportation • Dislike for school • Unsustainable lifestyle
- 75. #SHCFamily – an organic, unforced brand • Jesuit, Catholic • Liberal arts • Small college • Highly residential • Founded in 1830
- 76. #SHCFamily – an organic, unforced brand • REAL convo • Admissions driven • “Here, identify with this” • We are family! • Matches current brand
- 79. Read more about #SHCFamily: info.campussonar.com/waicu
- 80. What would you do with an always-on focus group? • What topics are top-of-mind with newly-admitted students? • What pop culture trends do our students follow that we could use to inspire programming or messaging? • How do our alumni talk about spending their money, supporting philanthropy, or their education?
- 81. Social listening is not a social media investment. Social listening is quickly becoming a required component for strategic intelligence in higher education.
Editor's Notes
- We have a trust problem in our country, around the world, and especially in higher education. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, which has been collecting data about trust around the world for over a decade, the most second most trustworthy person in this country is “a person like me.” This comes just behind an academic expert, who is most trustworthy – a position regained after being tied for first last year. CEOs – 37% Government Officials – 29% While 70 percent of people trust the education sector in general, the majority (58 percent) of Republican or Republican-leaning voters think higher education has a negative effect on our country. Trust is a valuable commodity. When we as individuals or organizations are trusted, we can be more efficient and productive.
- How much conversation is there? Well, we’ve measured that. We studied a year of online conversation from a representative sample of 65 higher education institutions in the United States. Much of our summary data doesn’t include athletics conversation, which accounted for 0–93 percent of online conversation about institutions in our sample (a summary of the athletics conversation can be found on page 14). Not all institutions in our sample had an athletic program and not all campus staff are interested in conversation about athletics. Removing athletics-related conversation from our initial benchmarks allows us to better represent conversation across all United States higher education institutions. The annual online conversation volume for the sample ranges from 21 mentions (a very small, private, nonprofit faith-based institution in the Southeast) to about 9 million mentions (a large, private, nonprofit doctoral institution in New England) from August 2017 to July 2018, with a median value of 3,509 mentions. Small schools average about 5,000 non-athletics conversations per year. Adding Athletics increases that conversation between 150%-200%, on average.
- How many individuals and organizations contribute to the conversation? That varies a lot.
- Private nonprofit institutions may not capture the same amount of non-athletic conversation as public institutions, but they almost always outperform public institutions in terms of non-athletic admissions conversations. With outliers removed, private nonprofits see up to 3,074 annual mentions from admitted students, while public institutions only see up to 1,525 for our sample. The range here is vast – the median is 27 admissions conversations; but at all measures privates have about twice as much admitted student conversation than publics.
- http://www.convinceandconvert.com/hug-your-haters/new-research-shows-how-fast-companies-have-to-be-in-social-media/
- http://www.convinceandconvert.com/hug-your-haters/new-research-shows-how-fast-companies-have-to-be-in-social-media/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/q2-2017/ - ranked education #13 out of 16 in brand engagement in Q3 2017 (how responsive brands are to consumers)
- Define owned vs earned. The percentage of owned conversation within the sample ranged from 0–76 percent, while the earned conversation ranged from 24–100 percent. Three institutions in our sample (small or very small private institutions) did not publish any owned content during our data collection period.
- While public institutions have higher metrics than private institutions by nearly every measure of online conversation, it’s interesting to note again the impact of athletics. With the addition of athletics conversation, the share of owned conversation for each type of institution falls between three percentage points of each other (32 percent to 35 percent) from a difference of 15 percentage points (17 percent to 33 percent) without athletics. Athletics conversation levels the playing field, one could say. Private institutions should leverage their owned athletic content as much as possible for brand alignment.
- The topics of owned and earned conversation can vary—63% of the institutions we studied saw no alignment in the top five topics. Alignment of owned and earned conversation themes is a measure of institutional influence, and only a third of institutions we studied currently see any alignment. Twenty percent of institutions shared at least one topic of conversation between owned and earned, and 10% aligned on two topics (some institutions had such low online conversation volume that we couldn’t measure topic alignment). What was different about the institutions with greater alignment? They saw more retweets of their owned content. Generating quality engaging content on Twitter that audiences want to share seems to influence how their audience talks about them online.
- Well-defined brands have clearly defined brand attributes. Historically, whether the brand attributes were resonating with audiences or not was measured based on feelings and perceptions. Now that much of the conversation is online, the growth of key brand attributes in brand conversation—and the sentiment of those conversations—can be quantified. Using qualitative research methodology, brand managers can develop a taxonomy related to their brand attributes to capture and categorize conversation that aligns with those attributes. Then, brand attribute conversation can be quantified as a percentage of all conversation, growth of each attribute can be measured over time, and sentiment of each attribute can be scrutinized to identify opportunities to improve brand messaging.
- This looks a lot like qualitative research!
- Over 4 months, 13%
- Online conversations are an always-on focus group that you can ask any question, at any time.
- We have access to unfettered opinions all over the internet, and I think modern market researchers need to be better at making use of them. While they may not stand up to the scientific scrutiny that a mall survey does, the thoughts and opinions that people like you and me post online, every day, are authentic and have the potential to provide really valuable insight to our organizations. With this in mind, I think that modern market research needs to have some essential qualities that social listening just so happens to deliver. Here are two examples.
- Responses from interviews with student success professionals
- This changed our recommendations
- Spring Hill College is a Jesuit, Catholic, liberal arts college located on the Gulf Coast in Mobile, AL. The College has about 1,600 students and is about 90% residential. Being founded in 1830, SHC is the oldest Catholic college in the Southeast and the third oldest Jesuit college in the U.S.
- In our work with Campus Sonar, we wanted to see the organic, real conversation that was out there, not only from constituents (students, alumni, friends, facstaff) but also from potential students and parents and our own community. Marketing is heavily Admissions-driven so we pay fast attention to what is being said about Spring Hill College. I am a firm believer in that you cannot create a brand and force your audience to identify with it. This is where our work with CS was so integral for me! Our college is small but being 189 years old, we have a great deal of alumni and others with a close relationship with the College. But what are they saying and how can we incorporated that so our message mirrors what they are saying? Turns out, our people love us as much as we love them. The most organic theme we saw after Campus Sonar looked back over three years of what people were saying about SHC is that WE ARE FAMILY. This was the most duh slash ah-ha moment I’ve had since I joined the SHC Family. Of course we are! And we knew that but … we didn’t? I’ve joked with Liz on Twitter that our social listening experience with CS is basically me saying we realized that “we know that they know that we know what they know.” We didn’t need to develop a whole new brand … our brand is right in front of us. Instead, we have given our brand a glow-up using either the word “family,” the idea of family or sometimes both.
- Liz talk about how the research works
- , enabling us to re-establish public trust and build more authentic relationships.
- Take questions/discussion/etc.