For the better part of a decade, we have heard of social media’s great marketing power and seen the rise of social platforms and their unavoidable daily presence. Despite the promise, significant swaths of corporate America still view social media with a certain distrust.

Higher Ed Leading in Social Marketing

Higher education, however, is embracing social media, and rightly so given their audiences’ demographics. Reliance on social media is well-established by young people. Less frequently addressed is the power of emotion that colleges and universities have harnessed to engage with their audience at a rate that makes other industries green with envy. The depth of engagement in higher ed is like nothing else.

I grew up on a campus. My father was a political science professor. From my earliest days, I understood the special appeal of a university campus; an understanding magnified when I arrived at college as a student.

For a higher ed social marketer, a powerful tool for creating engagement with your audience is contained in the history and experience of your campus and what it represents. Much of what links us to our alma maters is outside the classroom. You have an exceptional opportunity to engage with your audience through these shared emotional experiences.

The following recommendations come from analyzing thousands of social posts from hundreds of higher education institutions, as well as my own decades of marketing experience and the belief that the most valuable social engagement comes down to the emotional connection with your audience.

1. Use images

Sometimes when I tell people about the importance of imagery in social media, they roll their eyes like it’s the most obvious thing. After looking at thousands of social media posts, I can tell you that not everyone is doing it–but they should. With few exceptions, images create higher engagement than text-only posts.

One of our partners, Up&Up, has a client in higher education who made the shift from dry, text posts to more engaging, image-based posts. In just three months they saw a 344% increase in engagement (another two other clients saw 176% and 50% increases). It works. If you’re not already using images in every post, you’ll see a significant increase in engagement by doing so.

It should be the foundation of your approach.

2. Connect through tradition

School traditions, from the serious to the wacky, are the glue that ties communities together across eras. Most of these traditions add a unique flavor to campus life and are ripe for social posting.

One of my favorite examples is at Seton Hall, where tradition holds that anyone who steps on the seal will not graduate. The Friday, the 13th post below built on this notion to the tune of 1,380 likes and 13.7% engagement.

3. Acknowledge milestones

For those who celebrate it, the birthday post is generally one of the most engaging posts of the year. Be sure to take advantage of passing years to connect the past to the future as Montana State did.

Milestone posts, whether for the school, a building, a respected professor, the mascot, or much-loved staff member, give you an easy way to reinforce your sense of community.

4. Recognize accomplishments

You can always create great engagement by recognizing the hard work and accomplishments of current students. Not only will you give much-deserved recognition, but you help comfort alumni that their school is just as good as they remember. The post below by Haverford College netted them a gaudy 7.6% engagement on Facebook.

Similarly, awards for the school and alumni as big winners in engagement. This post by Miami University about Oxford, Ohio, being named best college town in the nation earned 14.5% engagement–and 5,500 likes. Take advantage of community pride!

5. Social media is an all-season activity

Marking the passing of seasons is a great way to acknowledge current events while giving alumni an opportunity to think back on their own time on campus. Every campus has the ideal spot for a late summer sunset, a leaf-covered walkway in autumn, the perfect vista for snow, or a grove of trees with glorious blossoms in the spring. Each of these will evoke memories and nostalgia.

When snow hit Portland, Oregon, in January 2017, Lewis and Clark College took advantage of great photos of favorite locations, earning a whopping 23.6% engagement on this post.

6. Use campus landmarks

Even if you don’t have notable weather, you can always create high engagement by posting photos of campus. Across all regions and audiences, iconic campus photos are a simple and effective way to connect with followers.

In the example below, Notre Dame captured a rainbow over the Golden Dome for 9.4% engagement on Instagram, and 7.2% on Facebook.

These types of posts can be shared multiple times and across platforms for greater effect. They should be the foundation of your image-based posting strategy.

7. It starts with Instagram

If your goal is audience engagement, keep (or start) using Instagram. Without question, Instagram is an engagement winner in higher education. It’s not a coincidence that many of the examples in this blog are Instagram posts.

The past two years, Rival IQ and Up&Up have partnered to analyze the social media results for hundreds of higher ed institutions. We have captured this analysis in our annual Higher Ed Social Media Engagement Report.

In 2017, the average higher ed post on Instagram delivered 3.6% engagement. During the same time, corporate social media efforts saw only 1.7%.

8. Sports, sports, sports

Another obvious one, but noting results for your teams, athletes, and fans is a terrific way to build engagement across your audiences. (Admittedly, it helps to post about successful teams, but that isn’t in your control.)

The post below by Whitman College on the success of their Men’s and Women’s basketball teams earned them a 13.2% engagement rate and a spot in their top 10 most engaging posts for the 2016/2017 academic year.

9. Mark transitions

It’s too obvious to mention posting about commencement. However, I do think it is important to think about *why* commencement is important. It represents many of the topics we’ve already covered: tradition, seasonality, community, emotion, etc.

Another example is the emotional time of freshmen arriving on campus in the fall. Your campus likely has a number of other events that meet the same criteria yet are less well established. Identifying those and posting about them will yield dividends.

In their most engaging post of the 2016/2017 school year, Georgetown marked the holiday period and saw an astonishing 18.4% engagement and nearly 6,200 likes. 

10. Create your own thing

Much of this list is about leveraging the innate emotional appeal of your campus and community, but plenty of room exists for you to stamp some of your own personality on your school’s social media presence.

One of my favorites is the way Stanford’s social media wishes goodnight to various locations on campus. The post below–wishing good night to the Dish, a radio telescope–is an example. From over 2,200 social posts by Stanford in the 2016/2017 academic year, ‘goodnight’ posts landed three posts in the top 21.

I challenge you to come up with something similar for your own community that effectively captures your campus vibe. With a little luck, you might create your own tradition.

11. Justify social internally

Look, if the Big Ten gets 14 schools, then my top ten list gets 11 points.

The previous items have been about your relationship with your social audience, but there is another audience that needs attention: your management.

All of us, no matter our positions, need to justify our efforts regularly. It is easy to say that social media cannot be tracked, or that the ROI of your efforts are impossible to quantify. Do not fall into that trap. Regularly reporting on your goals is never a bad idea, and helps show your value, explain the need for incremental budget, or define your influence.

Rival IQ can uncover your social benchmarks relative to your competitors so you can start tracking your efforts on social media. Start your free trial and decide for yourself.

The post 10 Steps to Drive Social Media Engagement in Higher Education appeared first on Rival IQ.

These conversations have dramatically impacted the way Rival IQ thinks about social marketing. While 2016 was a year of explosive growth for Rival IQ, I know that 2017 will be even better because of what we have learned from listening to those engaged in social marketing on a daily basis.

Today we are announcing a big step forward for our company and customers: new packages based on feedback and bundled in the way you want them, providing solutions for specific pain points that you’ve shared with us about your social marketing efforts.

Introducing Rival IQ Grow and Rival IQ Drive

To start, we are introducing two new, lower-priced packages specifically for individuals who want the ability to analyze social media.

Rival IQ Grow is for anyone whose social marketing includes just Facebook and Instagram but still wants to access the rich set of data in our most popular feature, Social Posts. Social Posts allows our customers to dig deep into key metrics like engagement, hashtag frequency, and even emoji use.

Rival IQ Drive is similar to Grow but adds Twitter to the analysis of the most popular social channels.

Available for purchase from within our free trial, both of these new packages help make social media analysis affordable for everyone.

Introducing Rival IQ Benchmark, Rival IQ Influence, and Rival IQ Accelerate

Those of you seeking a solution for more comprehensive social analysis have exciting new options as well.

Rival IQ Benchmark is ideal for anyone most interested in keeping track of the competition. Containing the best of our competitive analytics tools like Boosted Post-Detection, Benchmark makes it easy to stay current on the market and avoid being surprised by competitor activity.

Rival IQ Influence includes all the power of Benchmark with the addition of your organization’s social data through Boosted Post Analytics, Facebook Live metrics, Instant Articles, and our Google Analytics integration, making it an excellent choice for teams looking to track all the most common metrics and data. The early excitement around Influence suggests it may become the most popular package.

Rival IQ Accelerate delivers everything marketers love about our solution in a robust package: multiple years of data, unlimited landscapes, the ability to track dozens of companies, API access, and for the first time, social data will be available in less than hour so you can track social marketing at the speed of social marketing. That sound you just heard was our engineering team dropping the mic.

With these new packages, Rival IQ has a solution for you regardless of your investment in social media. And with the free trial, you can see for yourself.

If you are a current customer–thank you!–your current package and price will not change as a result of today’s news. If you have questions about upgrading to a new package, please contact your CSM who can explain in greater detail.

One of the joys of working at Rival IQ is the positive impact we have on our customers’ businesses. We’re confident these new packages will continue to bring essential social analytics to marketers, helping make informed decisions to drive success.

See Rival IQ in action.

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Overview

Atkins Nutritionals is a leading player in the $2.4 billion weight control nutrition category with a lifetime approach to weight loss and weight management. They manufacture and sell a variety of nutrition bars, shakes, frozen meals and treats designed around the nutrition principles of the Atkins program.

The Atkins marketing team works to engage consumers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to build community, awareness, and understanding of the program. Using a range of tactics including Rival IQ, the company successfully increased Instagram followers, increased engagement on Twitter and Facebook, and optimized content by channel and audience.

“Rival IQ has given us a simple and effective way to test and optimize our social marketing strategy.”

Challenge

Atkins was looking to grow followers and increase engagement versus the competition in a tight nutrition market. To achieve its goals, Atkins required new content concepts and techniques that would move the needle. While the company had developed buyer personas, these were not specific to social media. The marketing team suspected social media created an opportunity to engage people beyond their core audience, but they needed help identifying the right content to drive engagement and keep valuable customers from turning to the competition.

Solution

After assessing potential solutions, Atkins selected Rival IQ for its depth of data about competitive post performance as well as insights on content. Additionally, they wanted a solution that would provide a simple way to test and validate their social strategy.

Results

Atkins used Rival IQ to establish a baseline performance of its own social profiles and those of key competitors. Now they revisit these data points regularly to monitor progress. “In less than a year using Rival IQ, we increased our Instagram followers by 75 percent,” says Carrie Jordan, social media and email marketing manager, Atkins Nutritionals. “We also increased engagement rate per tweet by 51 percent and engagement per Facebook post by 31 percent. Rival IQ has given us a simple and effective way to test and optimize our social marketing strategy.”

She explains how: “Rival IQ provides data-driven answers to questions around post frequency, target audiences, and whether or not it is better to create posts with a broad message or a specific one. We are able to see the best post frequency for engagement, and discovered that it’s effective for us to create different content for different segments, posted throughout the day.”

Atkins also evolved its brand voice to better engage its followers, thanks to Rival IQ. “We saw that some of the best performing posts in our social media landscape used humor,” says Jordan. “While we aren’t going to completely change our brand voice for social media, we’ve found ways to incorporate a little more silliness and humor in our posts, which we’ve seen our audience likes.”

Jordan also says Rival IQ helped Atkins gain visibility into differences in audiences across platforms. “On Facebook, we see the conversation is a more serious one, about the Atkins lifestyle, whereas on Twitter it’s more about excitement and celebrating successes. Our Instagram audiences gets most engaged with our posts that are designed to inspire them.”

Beyond using Rival IQ to develop the content strategy, Atkins uses it for performance tracking. “Every month we take a deep-dive into our social marketing performance,” says Jordan. “Rival IQ shows us how we stack against the competition in terms of growth of likes and followers. I can easily look at of all our followers, how many have engaged and track our performance.”

Jordan explains how Rival IQ has enhanced the way she approaches Atkins’ social marketing. “Rival IQ has helped find the triggers we can use to increase our followers and our engagement. It’s gives deep data, makes it easy to understand so I can determine next steps. In short, it does everything I need it to do.”

Start Your Free Trial of Rival IQ Today!

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