Made by TINT for higher education and universities, please enjoy this guide on how to best use social media for your EDU community.

1. The Ultimate Guide To Using Social
Media To Engage Your Community
HIGHER EDUCATION

2. Contents
Introduction
6 Strategies & Tactics to Engage Your Community
Use Engaging Hashtags
Identify Your Community Influencers and Feed Them
Develop Student Community Ambassadors
Use Social Listening
Embed Social Content Across Digital Properties
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3. This guide takes you through the key strategies and tactics to using social
media to develop an online community.
With the development of online learning and the Edtech industry, there are more ways to
obtain a college degree today. As the student body moves to be more remote and less
engaged with on-campus activities, it is important to find ways to communicate and engage
with your entire student community online.
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4. 6 Strategies &
Tactics to Engage
Your Community

5. 1. Use Engaging Hashtags
Hashtags are an essential part of connecting with users on Twitter and Instagram, and
creating the right branded hashtag -- or chiming in on the right trending topic -- can make a
huge difference in generating conversations within your community.
#BoringHashtags
Although the hashtag #HarvardMathDepartment might be easy to come up with and
tempting to use, it does not entice someone to jump into the digital conversation. Hashtags
like #HarvardNerd or #HarvardNerdJokes are more fun, encouraging posting and sharing; it is
still broad enough to be relevant to a lot of people.
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6. #GreatHashtags
A great hashtag should give you an idea of
what a post is about, be able to encourage
new conversations, and add some witty
subtext to a post. We call this as
“paralanguage” here at TINT. See our ebook
How Hashtags Changed the World. Whether
your hashtag is self-deprecating, sarcastic, or
serious, it should be a clever way for you and
your community to express themselves.
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The hashtag #NUSBizFreshies is both interesting, fun, and niche-specific enough
that users will want to join the conversation.

7. Tips To Create a Memorable Hashtag
Be concise
· Long enough to start a conversation around a specific topic
· Not so long that people can’t figure out what it says, or have no room to write their
message within Twitter’s character limit
· Denny’s #CollegeIn5Words nailed it on the head
Be entertaining
· Create a branded hashtag that’s fun for your followers
· RedBull’s #PutaCanOnIt and Oreo’s #OreoHorrorStory are perfect examples
Use proper nouns
· Create and share hashtags that specifically mention your college - or even one niche
within your college (like the English department or the Acapella clubs)
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8. · Everyone likes feeling like they’re part of an exclusive group, and using a hashtag like
#HarvardHomeworkProblems will build a stronger community than #HomeworkProblems
Do your research
· When researching your hashtags, tools like Hashtagify make the process much easier by
searching for and locating trending hashtags, finding the ones that will be most relevant to
your audience
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You can learn more about creating the perfect hashtag through this blogpost,
5 Easy Hashtag Strategies That Will Make You A Social Media Hero.

9. 2. Identify Your Community Influencers and
Feed Them
The key to building a community is through consistent engagement from its members. While
every like, comment, share, and reply counts, some users carry more weight within your
community than others.
When selecting influencers to build your school’s online community, there are a couple things
to keep in mind.
First, they should be relatively predictable. You should know what their opinions are, and the
risks involved in using them to represent your brand.
Second, it helps to find influencers that are already active on social media and have a strong
following that matches your demographic.
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10. How To Engage Community Influencers
Identify influencers
· Check out the most active channels for your school and see whose posts get a lot of
Likes/Shares
· Common influencers within a college community include popular professors, student
athletes, and official icons like your school mascot.
Respond and repost frequently
· Let them know their voice is important to you
· Repost their content on your website, blog, and social accounts
Create more content
· Provide your advocates with a continued stream of highly shareable content
· Keep your content relevant to your influencers’ and audience’s interests
By showing influencers that their contribution and opinions are important to you, you’ll be able to
create more brand advocates and have more active influencers.
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11. Tactics to encourage engagement from community influencers include:
Repost their posts or content that they share
Reach out to them publicly on social media and ask
their opinion
Tag them in relevant posts
Share content featuring your influencers on your
website
Host an interview with the influencer on mediums
like Facebook Live or on your blog, and share it
across social media.
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Featuring community influencer content on your website
with a social media hub encourages ongoing engagement

12. Use tools like Mention to better identify
influencers in your community. Mention is like the
big brother of Google Alerts, and tracks mentions
of your brands across social media.
You can learn more about building more building
engagement in a college community through the
post, How to Boost Engagement With User-
Generated Content.
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Mention can reveal your top influencers
Tools to find influencers

13. 3. Develop Student Community Ambassadors
Your students are your best advocates. Take advantage of them! Create a Student Community
Ambassador program to help students interested in marketing get some initial experience
while building your brand. They can be anyone who is part of the student body, loves social
media, and most importantly, wants to represent the school.
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14. Train selected students
· Communicate your vision and goals to your ambassadors
· Provide them with a list of guidelines to follow
Provide access
· Give them access to the people, resources, or tools they need (even if that’s just contact
with administrators at the school)
· A lot of platforms, like Facebook, allow for different levels of user privileges
Establish check-ins
· Track progress each quarter
· Provide a set time each quarter or semester for feedback and to communicate new
initiatives
· You can use tools to track progress and share assignments. Trello, for example, is a free
tool that works like a virtual to-do list, and allows you to create moveable cards with
assignments on them.
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Identify students
· Target those who are either already active on social media or those that are highly
involved in campus activities.
How To Select Student Ambassadors

15. Even if you don’t start an official student
ambassador program, you still likely have
students who are proud of their school and
want to let the world know.
Using TINT can help you expose your existing
student community and amplify their voice.
Students trust other students more than
traditional marketing content, so make the
most of your community!
Students that are willing to share positive words about
their education from your school can become student
advocates, even if they have no training.
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You can read more about creating brand ambassadors through our blog post, How To Transform
Your Community Into Your Digital Marketing Force.

16. 4. Use Social Listening
Social listening is the practice of monitoring your social channels to see what’s being said
about your brand. It’s one of the most valuable opportunities schools have when they’re
looking to build a community online and boost engagement. Below are some of the benefits
of social listening.
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17. Important Events
Social listening can help schools find out about important events or groups, such as a
particular school club that is garnering a lot of attention on Facebook.
Crisis Management
Social listening can flag potential problems within a community. A single unhappy student
or faculty member can do more damage now than ever before. Being close to your social
community enables you to address these issues immediately and avoid a PR disaster.
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Conversational Trends
Social listening can help you jump in on rapidly developing topics of interest as they occur.

18. Use tools like Sprout Social or Mention,
which can help you to get a big-picture idea
of what people are saying about your brand.
You can read more about social listening and
social customer service through our blog
post, 11 Social Media Tools Every
Marketer Needs To Be Using Right Now.
How To Use Social Listening
Knowing what your community is saying is essential
to helping your community grow.
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19. Let’s say that you are a hosting an event at your school and you have to compete with bigger
events like concerts and massive events. It’s the week leading up to the event, and you are
pressured by event organizers to get the word out as much as possible. The week is about to
end, and students are starting to make plans for the weekend. Perfect opportunity to suggest
your event as a weekend activity! But how does one start tapping into those conversations?
And where can you find them?
By using Twitter Advanced Search!
Twitter Search is the jackpot for discovering conversations by specific keywords, hashtags,
users, location, dates and even the tone of the tweet.
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How To Use Social Listening with Twitter Search

20. Here is what you can filter when you search:
Contains all of these words
Contains this exact phrase
Contains any of these words
Contains none of these words
Contains these hashtags
Written in this language
From these accounts
To these accounts
Mentioning these accounts
Near this place
From this date
Positive tone
Negative tone
Question ?
Include retweets
Search for key terms like “Weekend ideas?” or “Where should I go this weekend,” and
segment tweets by the school location. The result? The perfect list of students to invite to
your event. Bingo!
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21. 5. Embed Social Content Across Digital
Properties
Most universities are using a plethora of social media networks to engage with their social
communities. Currently marketers need to keep up with all of these networks to stay in touch.
But, interacting with each of these networks separately is time confusing and doesn’t tell the
full story of what is happening. Therefore, a lot of universities like to collect and display
content from separate social channels in one place - such as their website, jumbotron, or a
digital screen. TINT provides an easy-to-use content display solution with superior content
curation and moderation capabilities that many universities like Stanford, Northwestern,
Purdue University, and Boise State University are currently using! Learn More
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22. Taking your User Generated Content and repurposing it across all of your key digital channels
is the most effective way to do all of the following:
Highlight the authentic stories that make up your community
Provide your community with a voice
Drive traffic and engagement where you want it
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Encourage sharing and participation
Collect authentic content to repurpose
Celebrate life-changing events for your students (Graduation, Admission Acceptance,
Career Placement, etc.)
to learn more, see how Boise State University used TINT

23. The best schools are using social hubs to expand engagement. Here are some tips to make
the most of your social hub:
Place it in a prominent location
Your community deserves to be highlighted. Make sure to put your hub in a prominent
location that will be noticed. User Generated Content results in 93% more dwell time than
corporate image galleries*
Add social prompts and CTAs.
It’s important to make it as easy to interact with your brand, so put CTA’s and prompts
directly in your content. UGC’s impact can be much stronger when it’s placed next to
social prompt buttons and CTAs that encourage users to share their own content on social
media.
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Social Hub Best Practices
* Meritus Hotels

24. *TINT is an easy to use content display
platform, and a number of higher education
institutions like Stanford, Northwestern, Duke,
and more are currently using TINT.
You can contact us to learn more here.
Knowing what your community is saying is essential
to helping your community grow.
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25. www.tintup.com