As high school seniors look toward the future, they’re also looking to social media to share their excitement and celebrate their success—and their future alma maters are joining in on the fun. In honor of the almost-holiday, we’re breaking down some of the top social trends around College Decision Day.

Pick your platform

No two college experiences are the same and no two social platforms are either. This College Decision Day, we’re seeing both students and institutions embrace platform-specific features to announce college acceptances on social media.

Sound off

The class of 2026 is probably the most digitally savvy set of students to ever walk onto a college campus. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’re taking full advantage of platform features like TikTok sounds to announce the biggest news of their lives.

Sounds aren’t just for incoming students though. Colleges and universities are jumping in on trending sounds to expand their reach, like Cape Fear Community College did with this pre-decision day post.

Retweets and responses

Twitter has always been a great place to get the conversation started. Higher education social media managers used Twitter’s interactivity to bring prospective students into the conversation. Those efforts paid off.

Using Sprout Social’s Advanced Listening tool, we identified almost 3,800 Tweets that mentioned #NationalDecisionDay or #DecisionDay between April 15, 2022, and May 3, 2022.

But what’s most impressive is the 18,000 engagements those Tweets garnered. And since College Decision Day is one of the happiest days of the year, 98% of those Tweets had a positive sentiment. Whether institutions were interacting with future freshmen’s posts or granting them the ever-coveted repost on their own page, higher education brands reaped the benefits of the post-acceptance excitement.

Authentic reactions

While most marketers might not think of Reddit as a traditional social marketing platform, students regularly turn to its forums to ask questions and compare notes on prospective colleges.

The subreddit r/ApplyingToCollege has over 784,000 members and impressive engagement. Between April 15, 2022 and May 3, 2022, the keywords “college admission,” “decision day,” “applying to college,” “college waitlist” and “college acceptance” were posted 967 times in that subreddit alone.

Whether admissions offices want to know how students rank their institution among their rivals or which programs and majors are about to take off, subreddits are a great source of students’ unedited thoughts, desires and anxieties. Even if colleges and universities haven’t made Reddit a core pillar of their social strategy, insights from the platform can be a great source for social content across your other profiles.

Creative content 101

The scale of College Decision Day means that higher education social media teams have to bring their A game—and they didn’t disappoint. This year’s slate of social posts placed a premium on creativity.

Peek behind the scenes

Beyond social strategy, a lot goes into making College Decision Day a success. Notre Dame took advantage of the back-end work they already had to do by giving their audience a peek behind the admissions curtain. Showing the admission letter process got their prospective students primed for the day they’d get their big packet in the mail.

Embrace the absurd

Knowing what engages your audience is the first step of every social media strategy and Ursinus College proved that with their TikTok college acceptance videos. They leaned into the absurdist humor Gen Z is known for and showed off their transition skills with their “It’s time to become a bear” campaign.

Make it relatable

Between the pressures of high school life, the stressors of being a teenager and the constant barrage of adults asking about their plans, potential first year students have a lot on their plates. When you add in near-constant marketing communications from colleges and universities, it can be a lot. Tulane University poked fun at themselves and their peers—while relating to the struggles of their audience—with hyper self-aware content.

Get schooled on social

As future classes live more of their lives online, social media will only become more prevalent in the college decision-making process. Colleges and universities are already catering to students’ online preferences and that won’t slow down anytime soon.

Bring up your social media grade level by checking out some more ways schools and universities are strategically using social media.

The post Choose wisely: Higher education marketers take on College Decision Day appeared first on Sprout Social.

“Purdue’s social media content is used to tell stories about Purdue Boilermakers and connect with students—past, present and future,” says Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Abby Eddy.

When Abby jumped onboard in 2019, she was faced with building a team from the ground up to broaden social’s reach and impact across the Purdue community. The Digital Engagement team was born, and has become a well-oiled machine. Thanks to the team including–three social media professionals and five interns, followers now engage with Purdue’s social content more than ever.

Purdue uses Sprout Social as a cross-departmental hub to level up social listening, create robust reports and keep their content on track.

Engineering engagement for students and alumni

The Digital Engagement team manages all of the University’s non-athletic channels across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest with more than 900,000 followers combined. And as their name suggests, they have a laser-focus on engagement.

We use Sprout’s Profile and Post Performance Reports to identify our top posts and to see what engagement looks like across channels monthly. We’re always looking at how we can replicate the success of top posts on other channels, and adjusting content accordingly.

Abby Eddy
Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Purdue University

“We’ve always had the motto that you can have a million followers, but if only a thousand are interacting with your content, your channels are useless,” Abby tells us.

Using Sprout takes the guesswork out of understanding what content resonates. “We use Sprout’s Profile and Post Performance Reports to identify our top posts and to see what engagement looks like across channels monthly,” says Abby. “We’re always looking at how we can replicate the success of top posts on other channels, and adjusting content accordingly.”

Sometimes, diving into analytics uncovers surprises that guide future strategies.

“We found that people love our nostalgic ‘then and now content’—it unifies alumni as well as current students, especially on Instagram. But it was surprising to find out that these posts performed really well on LinkedIn,” Abby says.

Purdue also uses Sprout to make sure they never miss an opportunity to interact with their audience. “Our interns are in the Smart Inbox daily,” says Social Media Specialist, Kolby Hagmaier. “They filter one channel at a time and look at comments from the previous 24 hours with the hope that everything is marked ‘complete’ at all times.”

The system they’ve developed is working. With 4.5 million total engagements, they’re already 151% to goal for the 2021-2022 school year.

We use Tags for every piece of content that we publish within Sprout, from overarching brand pillar tags to post-specific ones.

Kolby Hagmaier
Social Media Specialist, Purdue University

Where Boiler Up means listen up 

Purdue’s social team uses Sprout’s Listening feature to keep their ear to the ground and finger on the pulse of campus conversations and brand health. “We have alerts set up to help monitor spikes in conversation around specific topics,” Social Media Manager Ashlee Shroyer tells us. “It’s a helpful way to immediately identify if something is gaining traction—good or bad.”

In catching a crisis, speed matters—especially if a request for more information comes straight from the top.

“We’ve received requests from our President’s office to quickly run a report on topics and how they’re appearing on social media,” Ashlee tells us. “With our general ‘Purdue University’ topic, we’re able to search quickly by keywords to provide a fast snapshot.”

Social listening has also helped them collaborate with the Strategic Communication team to keep an eye on potential crises before they spin out. This keeps them proactive—not reactive. “It’s hard to know when something is starting to bubble up,” Abby tells us. “So if the Strategic Communication team gets wind of something, they can ask us to create Listening Topics to monitor it.”

But listening isn’t all crisis mode and no fun. The team also uses the Word Cloud (see an example of the Word Cloud for Sprout’s fictional coffee brand below) to identify  unexpected gems that inspire content—from conversations and themes to emojis.

“We see a lot of emojis in there,” Kolby tells us. “We’ll implement those same emojis in our posts to stay in lockstep with our audience.”

Using Tags to keep tabs on content and connect students

Purdue has a unique marketing superpower—an ambassador program of around 50 students who bring a first-hand perspective to their digital presence.

“Boiler Ambassadors use Sprout for their student-run Instagram account,” says Ashlee. “We provide Sprout training to all of the students so that they can publish and tag content, as well as run their own reports.”

After receiving Sprout and brand voice training, the students have free reign of their Instagram account and create content themselves. Using a special tag just for the ambassadors helps the student team and the Digital Engagement Team filter their specific posts.

With student ambassadors, interns and a full-time team powering Purdue’s social presence, maintaining one brand voice when responding to comments is key—especially when you’re fresh off of a 2020 rebrand.

Sprout is used as a cross-team hub where everyone can find pre-written responses in a unified brand voice—both evergreen FAQ responses and templates for events like big games or commencement.

“We have specific language we want to weave into comments and responses,” Abby emphasizes. “So we created a set of pre-populated responses in the Sprout Social Asset Library that our interns can pull from, which gives them the flexibility to respond to comments on the fly but also makes sure they’re comfortable with the language we’re using.”

Boiler Ambassadors use Sprout for their student-run Instagram account. We provide Sprout training to all of the students so that they can publish and tag content, as well as run their own reports.

Ashlee Shroyer
Social Media Manager, Purdue University

Keeping teamwork on track and revolutionizing reporting

A robust social team needs a robust organizational system to match. The Digital Engagement team has mastered the art of tracking and reporting on content. “We use Tags for every piece of content that we publish within Sprout, from overarching brand pillar tags to post-specific ones,” says Kolby.

They use the Tag Performance Report on a weekly basis to help their whole department quickly understand the impact and success of content. And they’ve used Sprout to revolutionize digital reporting—on their own team and interdepartmentally.

“The analytics we pull from Sprout are a major piece of the monthly digital performance reports we share with the full marketing department,” Abby tells us. “Those highlight everything from our social metrics and campaign updates to website analytics.”

Using Sprout, they are able to share social findings with the larger marketing department to celebrate successes, suggest data-driven changes and provide insight into their efforts.

Their ability to prove their efforts and results with data has built trust between the Digital Engagement team and marketing leadership—granting them the autonomy to post content that works.

“Sometimes we have to push back on the amount of content that we’re asked to push out because the volume of posts has gone up. But when that happens, we see engagement dip a little bit,” Abby tells us.

All aboard the future of social at Purdue 

Purdue has recognized and harnessed the power of social. They’re even using it to power larger digital initiatives. Having met and exceeded their 2021-2022 engagement goals, the Digital Engagement Team already has their eyes set on what’s next. In the future, they plan to even more closely track the role social plays in driving audiences to their admission site and converting them into future Boilermakers.

If you’re ready to connect your teams and your audience through the power of social media using Sprout Social, start your free 30-day trial or request a personalized demo. Get ready to tap into the game-changing insights waiting for you and your brand.

The post All aboard: How Purdue University increased their social media engagement by 24% appeared first on Sprout Social.

How are universities and colleges using social media in the wake of remote learning and school closures? We spoke to three institutions across Europe and the UK to find out what the new social media landscape looks like for them.

How universities and colleges use social media

Visibility and brand trust

It can be difficult for students to get a feel for a place before they enroll, but social media offers insight into the personality behind an institution. For ESCP, a business school with six campuses across Europe, social media is a place for raising awareness of their brand and securing trust with future and existing students.

“We are essentially working on visibility and brand trust to help our audience understand what ESCP really is. We’re not just a business school, we have our own values about sustainability, and about inclusion and many other things,” says Tom Maccario, Head of Digital Communication and Social Media at ESCP.

“When it comes to social media, first it’s visibility and impressions, then engagement. We want our messages and posts to be delivered to the maximum number of people, but we’re not looking to touch everyone. We want to touch the right people and have a conversation with them.”

Attract top-level researchers

Attracting potential students is an important goal for many institutions, but it goes further than that. The University of Cambridge taps social media to reach researchers and potential staff too.

“We use it to attract the best people in the world, whether that’s potential staff, researchers, undergraduate students or postgraduate students,” says Anu Hautalampi, Head of Social and AV at the University of Cambridge. “We also use it to keep in touch with alumni, partners and donors, to protect and convey the Cambridge brand, and to broaden the perception people have of Cambridge.”

The institution itself is renowned as one of the oldest universities in the UK, but through social media, they hope to portray its focus on cutting-edge science as well as its increasingly diverse community.

Reputation management

Reputation is everything for universities and colleges. The competition is fierce, so even a minor crisis can have a damaging effect. “My role is to look after the university’s brand and reputation on social media,” says Hannah Keep, Head of Social Media at Cranfield University. “It encompasses content reporting, crisis management, student recruitment, and customer service as well.”

The university implements the 80/20 strategy, where 80% of its social media effort is spent creating content and building the university’s online personality, while the remaining 20% is spent on direct selling and trying to convert new students.

The changing role of higher education social media during the pandemic

COVID-19 impacted every single industry, but universities faced a unique situation since their students and staff are based all over the world.

“When we passed the global shock of the pandemic, we understood quickly that the education system would change drastically (and we had to communicate this),” says Maccario.

There’s no denying that higher education social media usage has undergone a massive shift over the past two years. It’s gone from being primarily a form of advertisement to a multipurpose tool, including a central customer service hub and internal communications channel.

Sharing more community stories

The pandemic was a lonely time for a lot of people, particularly students who might not have been with their families or even in their home countries. ESCP understood that people were keen to feel close to others, even virtually.

“When it comes to social media, we understood that many people wanted to share their stories about the pandemic and remote learning. We had many, many testimonials, and a series of videos on Instagram called ESCP at Home that works really well. We also ran a contest for students, where we asked them to share their learning habits as well as their new lifestyle habits,” says Maccario.

Universities have identified social media as a community-driven forum that is to be used by everyone, not just the marketing team. Throughout the pandemic, they have encouraged students, staff and faculty to share their own relatable stories. Cranfield University was particularly driven by this idea of community. They specifically used social media to direct people to support services, since they found a lot of students were reaching out via their social channels rather than email and other traditional methods.

Embracing an informal approach to communication

Universities and colleges are often deemed formal landmarks, and their social media channels reflect this. During the pandemic, things changed as institutions began to realise that students craved human connection.

Cranfield University identified this need and switched up its approach to social media, taking on a more informal tone. “Rather than emailing and waiting for a response, people were recognising that we were friendly on social media and approached us there. We always use our names so people know they’re talking to a real person,” says Keep.

The pandemic created room for institutions to experiment. Take Cambridge University, which launched a TikTok account to get in front of prospective undergraduates.

“I wanted to get Cambridge on TikTok for a while because there was an age group we weren’t reaching,” says Hautalampi. “Coming up with TikTok content during lockdown was challenging of course, because we couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. But this just meant we had to repurpose existing assets—and it actually allowed us to get really experimental.”

Gaining a deeper understanding of their audience

Student priorities have changed over the past 18 months. Safety and human connections have become paramount, and universities and colleges are realising that to succeed on social media, they need to put their audience first.

“We understood that during the pandemic, there were many things we could post about, but a lot of it wasn’t relevant for the audience. Now we really want to focus on our audience relevancy and promote content that’s important to them,” says Maccario.

The goals of social media have shifted for institutions too. “When I first started at Cambridge, we were very focused on shares,” says Hautalampi. “We are now focusing a little bit more on reactions and we’ve started publishing content that’s more community-oriented.”

The pandemic raised a lot of opinions from students who expected their institutions to take action. It was a difficult time for social media managers who were trying to adhere to UK government guidelines, while communicating with students who had families in the worst affected countries at the time. Universities suddenly realised that social media was an instant barometer of what their students were saying, thinking, needing and expecting.

“When we were talking about what the Vice Chancellor might say in his video messages to students, I was able to show him what people were thinking and feeling. There was a time right at the beginning of the pandemic where social was really high up on the agenda,” says Keep.

Positioning social media as a customer service tool

Many companies—including those in the education sector—are discovering that social media can be used for much more than brand awareness. Social is a home for conversations with their audience, product feedback, competitive and market insights, and (most importantly during the pandemic) for customer service.

“Up until the pandemic, a lot of organisations had the luxury of never really being challenged on social media,” says Keep. But social channels quickly became an always-on way for students to get their inquiries, which meant institutions had to respond quickly if they wanted to provide stellar student support.

More than ever before, social media is a critical extension of institutions’ traditional support channels. “We are hoping to create a real community. We’re getting more and more messages on Facebook and Instagram asking questions like when it will be possible to join the next intake, or whether someone should study in Berlin or Madrid. Sometimes the answers aren’t always on the website, so the students ask us on social media,” says Maccario.

Uncovering a critical internal communications channel

The fast-paced nature of social media meant it quickly became a way for institutions to communicate internally with existing staff and students.

“We set up a Facebook group for staff,” says Keep. “It was at the point where suddenly everyone was going to be geographically dispersed. We debated creating one for years, and the pandemic gave us a reason to finally do so. It was so simple and easy for people to use, and it was a way of keeping the community together.”

Using social media as an internal communications tool was also a priority for Cambridge University during the pandemic.

“We started using social media to reach our internal community, who weren’t really a target audience beforehand,” says Hautalampi. “Because people went back home and weren’t physically in Cambridge, it was important for us to have a direct, real-time way to speak to our students and staff.”

Social media as the backbone of communication

“COVID brought into sharp focus the potential of social media channels, and the importance of having the right people managing them,” says Keep.

Social media has been the backbone of communication for many institutions during the pandemic. Colleges and universities quickly realised that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn were not just places to advertise their courses, but also key platforms for getting to know their audience, collecting market insights, and carrying out stellar customer service. Social went from being a place to reach new prospects and push out marketing messages to a central community hub, both for students and staff.

Universities view engaging with their students and staff as more than simple customer service, and social media lets them create a vibrant community that adds heart—during both exciting and difficult times.

Hoping to transform your institution’s approach to social media? Download our higher education playbook for actionable advice on everything from goal setting to reporting and community management.

The post How higher education social media has evolved in Europe appeared first on Sprout Social.

Consider all the miles runners put in training for a marathon, the diet considerations, how in-tune they are with their bodies. In my experience, it takes that same kind of endurance and dedication to create a sustainable social media strategy. It takes patience to stick with the program and listen and learn from your audience along the way.

This involves taking the time to do discovery work before you start a new social media account. What is the goal? Consider your content sources, your resources, the audiences you seek to attract. Is it sustainable? Opening a new account should be one of the last steps in your strategic plan, not the first.

And it’s important to stay the course, no matter what shiny new app comes along or how much a platform alters an algorithm.

Solve for engagement, not speed

There is one equation I know to be true for social media. More engagements will organically stretch your reach which = more followers. It’s that simple but it’s not easy.

When Facebook changed its algorithm (again) in January 2021, our reach numbers took a dive, like they have in the past. But we stayed the course, posting content we know our audience on that platform enjoys and values, not altering our strategy. Slowly, our organic reach numbers have been returning to where they were before the new algorithm and it’s taken us more than seven months to get back to where we were.

Right around the same time we saw our Instagram engagement dip, and it appeared to be another alteration with the algorithm.

We dug in, started to look at all of our posts at the minutia level and did what I call digital detective work. Why did one Instagram post have 10 more likes than another? We tried to find commonalities among the posts we felt performed well and then repeat it. For instance, we found that when it came to pictures of people, more “active” images where a person is shown with a project they’re working on, like these images below, tended to perform better than posed portrait photos.

Sometimes we were right, sometimes we were wrong. But by constantly tweaking and experimenting with our posts to stretch engagements, we were able to keep growing our audience. It was slow but steady.

Remember: Social is a people business, not a numbers game

Growing an audience takes time and constant listening and monitoring. That’s how you get to know your audience—what it likes, its triggers, its sense of humor. When you create a space that attracts people who connect with your culture, that’s when it becomes a community.

This past Valentine’s Day we gave our community a Valentine using their love language—numbers. And we definitely felt the love returned by the engagements and in the comments.

Growing something you care about takes patience and a lot of attention and for me that includes social media. After all these years, the lesson behind “The Tortoise and the Hare” still rings true.

The post There are no shortcuts to a sustainable social media strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

The university embraces social media as a way to connect with those communities and tell the Texas A&M story far and wide.

“People take their passion for the university to the internet, so over the last several years, we’ve been able to tap into that online community and grow it,” said Krista Berend, the Director of Social Media at Texas A&M.

Sprout Social helps Texas A&M effectively manage that growth at scale, which is important when your institution has 16 academic colleges and schools, 19 NCAA sports and hundreds of departments.

“We manage five different brands outside our institutional accounts. Sprout has been great for us because we can see all of those brands’ social in one place,” said Berend.

Telling the Texas A&M story through content

Social media content is critical when it comes to telling the Texas A&M story, but more than that, it helps Berend and her team build emotional connections with their community. Like a lot of social media teams, Berend prioritizes engagement and reach for their content goals, but also carefully considers timing and the feelings of the audience before publishing to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Reddit.

“We think a lot about our content, how it’s delivered and the mindset of people when they’re receiving it so we can make a positive brand impression. We think about how our audience might feel compelled to share because the content impacted them in some way or hit them in the right spot,” said Berend.

Sprout Social’s publishing suite gives Berend and her team a platform to collaborate on content creation, discuss strategy and provide feedback all in one place. “Our student interns are incredibly active and constantly creating content. Being able to correct things, give them feedback and just talk things out all within Sprout’s platform has been great,” said Berend. “It also helps those interns feel more actively involved when they can see everything that’s going on. Those features that facilitate collaboration have been critical for us.”

Collaboration also helps Texas A&M overcome decentralization, a common challenge among higher ed institutions. “We combat decentralization by creating relationships and being a resource for other departments or teams in the Texas A&M system that are working in social,” said Berend. “Recently, for example, we got a message in Sprout about our recreational sports center. Even though the message wasn’t directed to the Texas A&M rec sports social channels, we were able to pass it along to the right people because we’ve built the relationship.”

Tagging gives content themes and topics equal playtime

Tracking content themes and performance is critical for such a massive institution, and Sprout’s Tag Report has been particularly useful for Texas A&M.

“Tagging our content has helped us ensure that our content is equally distributed across our many departments, divisions and academic colleges. Looking at the Tag Report, we can see if we’re skewing too much toward one college, sport or event versus another. Then, based on that data we can self-correct and diversify our content,” said Berend.

The importance of accessibility

Texas A&M is committed to creating engaging and diversified content, and it’s equally important that their content is accessible. Sprout’s accessibility features were a big factor in their decision to become Sprout customers.

“Creating accessible content has been a priority of our team for several years, and things like including image descriptions are just part of our workflow. With the software we were using before, we had to do all of that natively across social channels,” said Berend. “With Sprout we can do all of that within the platform, which makes our workflow so much easier. Plus, as social channels add more accessibility features, we’ve noticed that Sprout almost immediately has those in the back end for us to use.”

A big school making a big impact on social media

Texas A&M’s mission to build more engaged social communities is accomplished with Sprout’s cost-effective platform which facilitates collaboration and gives a comprehensive view of the social landscape all in one platform.

In just six months, between August 2020 and January 2021,  Texas A&M earned over 131 million impressions and 8.3 million content engagements across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. And their community just keeps growing, with an average of just over 13,000 followers gained monthly. Gig ’em, Aggies!

Discover what your higher ed institution can accomplish with Sprout Social. Start a free trial today.

The post How Texas A&M uses Sprout Social to build communities and accessible content appeared first on Sprout Social.

And though some may view social as little more than an awareness play, the reality is social can support higher education institutions at all stages of their marketing funnel. With a robust social strategy, universities can strengthen their international profile, influence prospective students’ decisions and turn graduates, employees and industry partners into staunch advocates.

In this article, we’ll break down what the university marketing funnel looks like and how your social strategy supports each stage of the funnel. We’ll hear from expert social marketer, Rob Brooks, who will show us how his team puts this strategy into practice for The University of Newcastle, Australia.

Social supports all stages of the marketing funnel

When it comes to aligning your social strategy with your marketing funnel, Rob recommends identifying what you hope to achieve at each stage of the funnel and how social can support those goals.

At the awareness stage, one primary goal for The University of Newcastle centers around recruitment. Here, Rob’s team is focused on getting their university’s name in front of as many prospective students as possible and strengthening their brand on social. Consider what social platforms are most popular among high school students and what content will resonate strongest with students starting to think about university.

As students move into the consideration stage, how might marketers use social media to serve up content that encourages prospects to ask for more information? Sharing content like a glimpse at the different types of learning opportunities available to students can entice prospects to learn more about your offerings.

Once you have your audience’s attention, using social to highlight your university’s unique selling points can help lead students through to the decision stage of the funnel. Rob’s team, for example, uses social to showcase what makes the University of Newcastle different from other universities, like the values of the institution and the location of the campuses.

Moving into the adoption stage, this is where universities can leverage social to support students as they enroll and settle into university life. Universities, for example, can use social to educate students on important dates for class registration or highlight lesser known certificates across a range of disciplines.

Finally, consider the role of social media in supporting advocacy. The University of Newcastle has an alumni network of over 148,000 former students and has more than 9,000 staff. As another way of engaging their audience, Rob’s team features current students, staff and alumni to highlight the lifestyle and career opportunities which come from being part of the university community.

Social data is the key to success

In order for your full-funnel marketing strategy to be successful, every social team needs to lean on their data.

For Rob, social data is what enables his team to connect their work to a specific business outcome and to act as strategic advisors to stakeholders across the university. And to ensure there’s a clear tie between social performance and business outcomes, there are several social metrics Rob’s team uses to measure performance at various stages of the marketing funnel. In the awareness stage, they are looking at metrics like impressions and follower growth. For the consideration stage, metrics like link clicks matter most while conversion metrics support the university’s goals at the decision stage.

With Sprout Social’s analytics offerings, social teams are empowered to quickly aggregate social data and create reports filled with insights like historical performance data and campaign analysis. In addition to maintaining the big picture of all the university’s social platforms, Rob is also able to measure his team’s performance and gather data around things like task completion and customer care response times.

Above all, data helps social teams provide context around why something works and where adjustments need to be made to achieve goals at each stage of the marketing funnel. Marketers can help educate their executives on what social awareness means, what efforts are successful and why going viral isn’t always the answer. Social data also equips marketers with the proof they need when making the case for additional resources when crafting a social strategy.

Tag and track everything

One can never have too much social data to work with, especially when it comes to building a full-funnel social strategy. To further slice and dice social data, Rob employs Sprout Message Tagging to keep track of every post sent from their university’s account. It’s not unusual for Rob’s team to tag a piece of outgoing content with 10 different tags, from who publishes a specific piece of content to the key stakeholder to the content pillar.

Tags make it possible for the University of Newcastle’s social team to report back on that piece of content’s performance and whether or not it is effective for their goals at its intended stage of the funnel. Rob is able to see, for example, that user-generated content has an engagement rate more than double the university’s created content. With this information, the social team can then double down on giving students the content that resonates strongest with them.

Consider how tagging further helps empower social teams like Rob’s to align their strategies to two specific stages of the funnel:

• Awareness. With tags, marketers can dive deep into their data to allow their content strategy to evolve the way it should: based on the immediate needs of their audience. High school students might be interested in webinars or photos showing campus life, while content featuring professors may be less likely to catch a prospect’s eye. With this data, social teams can pour their resources into the content that is proven to raise awareness amongst potential applicants.
• Decision. Tagging also enables social teams to attribute conversion metrics like application button clicks to specific pieces of content. Using Sprout’s URL Tracking feature, Rob’s team can report on post-click actions on the university’s website and which social post drove that action. Tagging data can help marketers determine which channels are most effective in driving conversions, and allows social teams to report on more than just vanity metrics.

Do more with your university’s social strategy

With social data, marketers can do more than support their university’s awareness goals. In addition to getting their university’s name in front of prospective students, social marketers can move prospects through the marketing funnel to the decision-making stage.

But to create a full-funnel marketing strategy, social teams need to embrace their social data. At the University of Newcastle, data fuels the social team’s strategy—and they have meaningful results to show for it. With Sprout, marketers can easily measure social performance across the entire marketing funnel and simplify reporting so they can invest more time in strengthening their social campaigns.

For social marketers in higher education looking to implement a full-funnel social strategy that drives results, try Sprout Social with a free 30-day trial today.

The post How the University of Newcastle uses Sprout to power their full funnel marketing strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Brands and organizations do not have to have a global presence or thousands of followers to need for multiple Twitter accounts. If you have a wide audience, multiple products or services or different departments with different goals, then multiple Twitter accounts might be your best solution.

While having multiple accounts may seem like it’s just creating more work for you, with detailed planning and thought, you’ll find that it helps you out in the long run. Your messages will land with the target audience you want

When to use multiple Twitter accounts

From your brand’s point of view, can you answer yes to any of these questions?

• Have you written a Tweet where you wished you could target a more specific audience?
• Has managing customer service inquiries taken up the bulk of your time on Twitter?
• Do you have multiple locations or offices in different states, regions or countries?
• Do you have a mascot that has its own fan base?
• Do you have multiple products or service categories that are directed to different audiences?

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you might be in the market for another Twitter account.

Higher education

Colleges and other higher education institutions have many different audiences that they need to talk to. Multiple accounts help narrow down the focus and invite their followers to pick and choose which interests to follow along with.

The content and goals of an admissions department will be vastly different from the goals of the football team. The same goes for the differing audiences for department news, alumni communication and grad schools.

https://twitter.com/MarquetteAlumni/status/1235373369287004161?s=20

Marquette University manages 44 Twitter accounts with Sprout Social. The main Marquette account sifts through what is most important to share from the other accounts while they continue to post more specific content for their audience.

Multiple product & service lines

Do your different products and service lines serve significantly different audiences? If yes, then it’s time to create a new Twitter account.

Adidas created accounts for each of the sports that they participate in. The main account focuses on their brand messaging, storytelling and major partnerships while separate sports ones focus solely on that sport. If there was not an Adidas Wrestling account, then wrestling would be only a small focus of the main account. With this separation, Adidas Wrestling is able to talk about wrestling all the time and build up their community with a focus.

Customer service focus

According to the Sprout Index™ XVI: Above & Beyond, of the reasons social media users reach out to brands on social, 37% are focused on customer service issues, while 59% will reach out with praise after a great experience, and 23% for social connection or alignment with the brand’s belief.

This speaks to the balance of demands placed on a social media team to respond quickly to all types of messages. It might be easier for a customer service team to manage product-centric comments and compliments, while a community management-focused team fields social and brand values-related posts. With that division of labor in mind, it might be the time to create that customer support Twitter handle.

https://twitter.com/VZWSupport/status/1268666570445914114?s=20

As a national company, Verizon has its hands full managing the feedback and complaints on social media. For their customer service, they created a separate Twitter account to directly listen and respond to customer issues and questions.

Recruiting

Did your goal this year include more focus on hiring through social media? Let your recruiting department take the reins.

While the main account of Salesforce focuses on promoting their products, the careers account focuses on sharing notes about company culture. Salesforce has offices around the world. With a careers account, the recruiting department can easily share career advice and listen for potential applicants.

How to set up multiple Twitter accounts

Setting up a second Twitter account is just like setting up any other new account. But details matter. You don’t want followers to look at your new account and not immediately understand its purpose or connection to your main one. If possible, verify your other accounts.

Check your resources

First, you want to make sure you have the resources in place to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Look at your audience insights and Twitter analytics to determine how much attention each account will need. Do you have the staff to quickly respond on all the accounts? Sprout’s Twitter report will easily distill this down for you.

Ensure a consistent visual brand across accounts

Next, you want your new account to be visually identifiable as a brand account. This is often done with similar logo usage and/or mentions in the bio section. Airbnb has quite a few Twitter accounts. In the above example, their Australia account uses the same logo as the main account so customers can easily identify it as a valid account. This step should be part of your larger social media branding strategy.

Identify your brand voices

Finally, set up and define your brand voice. What are the absolute musts that your brand’s voice need to have across all platforms? Now how can these differ for your multiple Twitter accounts? For example the college admissions account should use more vocabulary and language that matches the voice of the students they are trying to recruit. The medical school account might take on a more formal, scientific voice.

How to directly manage multiple Twitter accounts

Decided that you want to have multiple Twitter accounts? The next step is to learn how to manage and analyze the different accounts.

Choose your social media management software

This is a very important first step. While Twitter’s native app and Tweetdeck both offer easy ways to switch between accounts, you will eventually need a management software that can easily publish content and sync across accounts.

Sprout Social’s software is built to grow right alongside your brand. With different permissions and teams available, you can easily schedule one Tweet across multiple accounts within one window. In addition, a shared Asset Library ensures that you’re consistently on brand.

Have a separate social customer service team? No problem. Any messages that come into the inbox can easily be tagged and reassigned to the right team. No need to log out of one account to respond as another. Customer service management should be this seamless so your team can focus on the care portion.

Create an internal approval process

With large and divided teams, you run into issues of making sure Tweets are on brand and timed correctly. How do you resolve this? Create an easy approval and assignment process.

A unified calendar and draft review process in Sprout is as easy as a click of a button. With the publishing calendar, you’ll be able to easily see what’s scheduled among all of your accounts. If approvals are needed for some Tweets, then select it when you’re composing it.

When a Tweet comes in that asks about your product, which account and which team member should answer it? For some teams, someone is directly responsible for sifting through incoming messages and assigning them to team members. Then these team members are able to focus on crafting messages to customers instead of wading through noise.

Set individual goals & metrics

As mentioned earlier, having different Twitter accounts mean that you have different focuses. One account might want to increase brand awareness while another is more interested in increasing engagement with its current community members. Approach each new account like you’re approaching your overall marketing strategy and set up meaningful, measurable social media goals.

In the above example, ESPN and ESPN Fantasy Sports are very different. While they share the same brand, ESPN Fantasy Sports is far more interested in fantasy sports and creating a community around it than ESPN is. These different focuses require different metrics to measure their successes.

Analyze multiple Twitter accounts effectively

With goals set, the final step of the management strategy is to make sure these goals are getting reached. For the C-suite, you’ll want to have a birds-eye view of your entire brand. How has the brand been performing as a whole? Are there trends this month that weren’t there last month?

The Sprout Profile report allows you to check off all your accounts in one report. The presentation-ready imagery mean you spend less time creating a spreadsheet and inputting data manually, or trying to translate that data into the ideal visualization.

Seeing all your accounts together is nice, but even nicer is how narrowly you can focus in on your Twitter analytics. A single account report gives you details on what’s trending with your specific account. These details might not surface in your group report and they’re important to seeing how your strategy has performed.

Convinced that you need to set up a new Twitter account? Let Sprout Social guide you through the process with a demo.

The post How to manage multiple Twitter accounts easily appeared first on Sprout Social.

But even as COVID-19 continues to ravage countries all over the world, how people are talking about the crisis is changing. People are anxious to return to their normal lives and conversations around when the lockdowns will end are gaining traction on social. In Italy, mayors are taking to Twitter to lambast civilians disobeying stay-at-home orders; and in states like Wisconsin and Michigan, people are taking to the streets to protest extended quarantine policies.

Marketers have already adjusted their social strategies in response to COVID-19. Now, they find themselves having to reevaluate and readjust once more as consumer behaviors and conversations evolve. But with the majority of the world still under lockdown and people growing increasingly restless, what are marketers to do?

To help answer these questions and more, we dove once more into Sprout Social’s Featured Listening Topic to better understand people’s behaviors and how certain industries continue to navigate this pandemic.

From #StayAtHome to #EndTheLockdown

Lockdown fatigue is on the rise

At the beginning of the year, Twitter was filled with conversations related to staying home and COVID-19 virus. But from March to April, the topic volume around COVID-19 dropped 39% even though the number of confirmed cases more than doubled from one million to 2.7 million.

Around the same time, the conversation around testing kits and vaccines shifted. Data from the Sprout Social Featured Listening topic reveals discussion around vaccines hit a message volume high around mid-March before falling around the beginning of April.

But after several weeks of quarantine and stay-at-home orders, people are growing increasingly restless to return to their normal lives. The beginning of April saw social conversations around ending the lockdown gain steam, growing 268% from March to April. Additionally, engagements in “end the lockdown” conversations increased by 353% from March to April, with message volume peaking on April 21, the same day several states announced their plans to reopen.

Not everyone is ready to reopen

Despite an increase in lockdown fatigue, people remain conflicted about the idea of states reopening. We noticed a 7% decrease in positive sentiment surrounding “end the lockdown” conversations once states began to relax their guidelines and the usage of the hashtag #StayHome increased by 21%.

These conversations became even more emotionally charged when we looked at what was happening at a state-by-state level in the US. Adding the keyword “state” to the “end the lockdown” conversation saw a 483% increase in negative sentiment and a 456% increase in messages during the month of April. Conversations around reopening are likely to take center stage as states like Florida and Texas let their stay-at-home orders expire.

How three industries are responding to COVID-19

Every industry has had to adjust its operations in the face of this pandemic. Restaurants have pivoted to curbside pick-up and takeout orders only, while those in the fitness industry have switched to online training models.

In the following section, we’ll take a closer look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted three different industries and how brands have responded.

Higher Education

From January to March, higher education generated 8.4 million mentions, with conversation volume peaking around March 12 as universities across the country announced campus closures and students aired their concerns over being kicked off campus on such short notice.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the top keywords used when discussing COVID-19 and higher education was “online,” as students and faculty alike navigate virtual classrooms together. For graduating seniors especially, recent conversations have centered around cancelled graduations and the move to online ceremonies.

In response, brands and high-profile celebrities are taking matters into their own hands to celebrate young graduates. YouTube is hosting a graduation livestream with commencement speakers including Barack and Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga, while beer brand Natural Light plans to host its own commencement event on Facebook Live.

Key takeaways (1/1/20-5/13/20):

• Higher education garnered over 14.6 million mentions across 3.5 million unique authors through mid-May of 2020.
• The top keywords used when discussing COVID-19 and higher education include “online,” “university,” “people,” “college,” “students,” and “time.”

Healthcare

Few industries have been hit harder by the virus than the healthcare industry. From January to April, there were over 69.7 million conversations around healthcare and COVID-19 by 12.2 million unique authors in Sprout’s Featured Listener.

While overall sentiment skews positive, much of the negative conversations around healthcare focus on the challenges healthcare professionals face. Thirty-five percent of the healthcare conversation is negative, with topics like slowing the spread and the sacrifices of healthcare workers attracting the most engagement.

On a more positive note, brands are taking to social media to demonstrate their support and gratitude for healthcare workers around the world. McDonald’s, inspired by New Yorkers who applaud healthcare workers every evening, has Tweets with the clapping hand emoji scheduled to send every night at 7pm.

Prominent celebrities have also joined in on the virtual celebrations. Athletes like Wayne Gretzky and Donovan Mitchell are sharing photos of their jerseys with their names replaced with that of a doctor or nurse on their social channels using the hashtag #TheRealHeroes. Beloved Red Sox player David Ortiz has teamed up with local Boston organizations to donate food and other essentials to first responders.

In addition to recognizing healthcare workers by name, several brands are using their social platforms to give back to doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals. PUMA, for example, donated over 20,000 pairs of sneakers to healthcare workers while EOS donated over 100,000 hand creams to New York hospital workers. And popular coffee chain Dunkin’ Donuts recently shared their give-back initiative providing free coffee and donuts to doctors and nurses.

Key Takeaways (1/1/20-5/13/20):

• Conversations around healthcare and COVID-19 generated 69.7 million mentions and over 1.7 trillion social impressions from 1/1/20-5/13/20.
• Healthcare mentions spiked in mid-March as the discussion around testing began to increase, with the words “test,” “testing,” and “test” mentioned 179,000 times on March 13.

Retail

With consumers still stuck at home, the demand for online shopping and delivery services is higher than ever before. From January to mid-May, the conversation around retail generated over 6.1 million social mentions across 2.6 million unique authors in Sprout Listening’s Featured Topic. Retail social mentions then hit a high of 370,150 messages on March 15 as major retailers like Nike and Starbucks announced the indefinite closure of their brick and mortar stores.

Another factor to consider when examining the conversation around retail is the treatment of essential workers. On April 12, we noticed a significant dip in overall sentiment as retail workers took to social to share their concerns about working at essential businesses, like grocery stores, during the pandemic.

As states increasingly look to lift stay-at-home orders, retailers are also exploring options to safely reopen their doors to customers. Gap, Macy’s and Nordstrom are just a few major retailers with plans to reopen their stores by the end of May while Starbucks in the UK announced its phased reopening beginning May 14.

Key Takeaways (1/1/20-5/13/20):

• Conversations around retail and COVID-19 peaked with 660.3k mentions between 3/14/20-3/15/20 as non-essential businesses announced temporary closures and reduced business hours.
• The top hashtags most frequently used when discussing COVID-19 and retail included #StayAtHome, #Lockdown, #ecommerce and #SocialDistancing.
• From March to April, the overall volume of retail conversations on social dropped 50% as people adjusted to the new retail normal.

The COVID-19 conversation remains fluid

Listening data reveals COVID-19 conversations are on the decline, but the fact remains that the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down. And as businesses toy with the idea of loosening their restrictions, new challenges will emerge that brands need to be prepared to face head on. With so much uncertainty still ahead, here are two things all brands should consider:

• Stay agile. As much as we’d all like to resume our daily lives, the reality is COVID-19 is sticking around for the long run and the situation can turn on a dime. For brands, maintaining a sense of agility is crucial for surviving this pandemic. Are you able to respond to an overnight shift in consumer behaviors? While COVID-19 conversations are on the decline, is your brand ready for the new challenges that accompany plans to reopen for business? In situations where there is no rulebook on what to do next, brands need to be agile enough to manage and adapt to unexpected change at a moment’s notice.
• Keep an eye on state-level conversations. With talks of reopening gaining steam, brands need to pay close attention to what’s happening at the state-by-state level and what their customers are saying. If reopening is in your near future, what precautions are you taking to address some of the concerns of your customers? Or what backup plans do you have in place if you decide not to reopen? Make sure you’re localizing your messages as state plans to reopen take center stage and keeping your customers up to date on the latest happenings for your business.

Looking for more resources?

• Sprout Social Listening Featured Topic
• A closer look: What brands need to know about COVID-19
• Essential Sprout features to help your brand maintain connection in an uncertain time
• What to do right now: How to navigate through a global crisis on social media
• From Crisis to Connection: How to Build a Social Media Crisis Management Strategy

The post A look ahead: Examining the shifts in the COVID-19 conversation appeared first on Sprout Social.

They chose Sprout Social. Since then, the powerful tools at their fingertips have helped improve the student experience, manage the university’s reputation, unify their voice system-wide and even make a case for hiring new staff.

The Tag Report has been a huge change for us in the past year. We have a lot going on, so using that function to track campaigns makes it easy to separate things out, check the performance to each account and get a quick report that we can send off to our partners.

Morgan Campbell
Social Media and Digital Marketing Specialist

Overcoming decentralization 

For many higher education institutions, decentralization is a challenge. “Before colleges really understood what social media would mean and how to use it strategically, individual departments were creating their own profiles. By the time that I started here in 2017 there were at least 600 different IU related accounts just for IU Bloomington,” says Clayton Norman, the social media and digital marketing leader for IU Studios, the marketing and communications branch of the university.

IU also uses several social platforms to target different audience segments—Instagram, YouTube and TikTok for current and prospective students, Twitter primarily for students and faculty, Facebook for reaching parents, grandparents and alumni, and LinkedIn for research faculty and young, professional alumni.

With so many accounts across platforms, it could be difficult to maintain a consistent brand and unified strategy. IU has developed several different ways to overcome that challenge. One being the Social Media Council, a community of IU practitioners that come together to share best practices, recent wins, ways to collaborate across the IU system and more.

Additionally, Norman and his team act in a consulting role for different units, including administrative offices, departments and programs. “We help each unit think more strategically about where they want to go with their own brand, what their story is going forward and how they can execute that on social to fit within the larger IU brand,” says Norman.

In addition to the essential collaboration between IU Studios and the whole IU network, Norman and his team use Sprout’s Message Tagging and reporting tools to back up strategic thinking and execution.

“The Tag Report has been a huge change for us in the past year. We have a lot going on, so using that function to track campaigns makes it easy to separate things out, check the performance to each account and get a quick report that we can send off to our partners,” says Morgan Campbell, IU’s social media and digital marketing specialist.

Listening to the student voice

Campbell also manages monitoring and publishing in Sprout every day, so she is on the front lines of community engagement. She keeps a close eye on what students are saying and brings those insights to leadership.

Using Sprout’s Smart Inbox, Campbell addresses comments, questions and concerns all in one single stream. Campbell can also reference conversation history in the Contact View while replying to personalize messages for anyone that she’s responded to previously. It’s also a useful feature for her to gauge what the intent of the conversation is.

“If I see that a user keeps coming up in the Inbox with complaints, I can look at the history and see how long it’s been going on. Are they actually looking for answers? Or are they just venting like a lot of people do on social media?” says Campbell. “We want to build relationships with as many people as we can, but don’t want to waste time. Looking at the conversation history helps us decide if a response will help or if the user is just being difficult as a result of their frustrations.”

In addition to Campbell checking the Inbox and managing 1:1 communication, the IU team gets invaluable insights from Sprout’s listening tools. As students arrived on Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s (IUPUI) campus in the fall of 2019, the social team used Sprout Listening to keep an eye on chatter. They found that overall sentiment toward IUPUI was 85% positive for the month of September, but parking issues put a dent in that sentiment.

The IU team set up a social listening query with keywords “IUPUI” and “parking,” as well as all Tweets to the @IUPUI and @IUPUIPARK accounts mentioning the word “parking.” In one month, they measured 211 topic mentions, which highlighted the growing issue. Not only that, but the team also uncovered specific frustrations like the cost of parking permits, inability to find spots and campus construction that exacerbated the issue. With that information, IU Studios was able to report their learnings to leadership and start a larger conversation about the issue.

“You can’t just make new parking spaces out of nothing, but that was one of the first examples where we were able to really demonstrate the value of social listening to school leaders,’ says Norman.

With Sprout’s listening tools, we’ve really been able to solidify our place at the table when it comes to strategy, marketing, content development and how the university acts and responds in the face of challenging situations.

Clayton Norman
Social Media and Digital Marketing Leader

Mitigating campus crises

When it comes to crisis management, the IU team has learned that moving quickly when an issue starts to gain traction is key to a successful and coordinated response. Their ability to identify and surface issues as they arise is critical to developing an effective social response strategy as well as providing actionable insights to the university’s leadership team.

Listening has become their go-to tool for crisis communications. When a Twitter account with half a million followers unearthed some insensitive Tweets from a tenured IU professor and shared them with their network, it posed a real problem for the university. However, the social team took swift action, setting up a Listening Topic to understand the volume and reach of conversations happening around the issue.

Next, they set up Inbox Rules to auto-apply tags on the specific incoming messages related to the issue and the university. “Being able to automate that process so that all of the messages that come in during these situations are channeled into one space lets us analyze messages quickly, make decisions or offer suggestions to leadership about what actions should be taken,” says Norman.

Adopting this playbook has enabled them to respond rapidly to both global and brand issues on social and inform university leadership’s response plan. Their team can provide insight into the progression of the narrative of a crisis, including inflection points and what caused them, and share actionable intelligence to help the university respond at the speed of social.

Within almost 24 hours of when the issue really escalated, IU’s provost, armed with the listening data, released a statement, staked out IU’s position condemning the professor’s Tweets and headed off a lot of the conversation that was growing on Twitter.

“With Sprout’s listening tools, we’ve really been able to solidify our place at the table when it comes to strategy, marketing, content development and how the university acts and responds in the face of challenging situations,” says Norman.

Proving the value of social

Proving the value of social is one of the top challenges marketers face, but with Sprout’s Premium Analytics, IU uses concrete metrics that demonstrate the value of their work to their partners.

Norman, Campbell and the rest of their team work closely with the IU newsroom to share their content. “Giving them Sprout reports with link clicks to show how many people are continuing on to the newsroom from our posts, has really solidified our relationship as partners,” says Campbell.

When IU publishes a larger campaign post for the newsroom that drives engagement and conversation, Campbell can share the Post Performance Report to show newsroom partners that success. “Sprout reports not only show people what we’ve done, it’s also just satisfying for me to have something tangible to show off,” says Campbell.

The Group Report made it easy to measure IU’s whopping 105 million impressions, 4.2 million engagements and 350,000 link clicks across all channels this year. With this data at their fingertips, the IU team took the report a step further by creating a social media year-in-review video that they can easily share with their partners, students and leadership.

Making a case for additional resources

When a new Chief Marketing Officer joined IU in 2019, they asked what percentage of their content was video and how it performed compared to other content types. At the time, the IU team had to manually calculate video views across all platforms for a full year in an Excel file, which was time-consuming and tedious.

“At that point, we were looking for more analytics that included more video metrics that we didn’t have to pull by hand. With all the work we put in at the onset, we were able to say, ‘Look, we can get six weeks of work back for the university just by upgrading our Sprout plan to get Premium Analytics,’” says Norman.

On top of that, IU Studios was able to make a case for keeping their video interns on the team for longer than their initial contract. “We used the tagging function to identify anything that the interns made themselves. The Tag Report showed how many views they got and how much more we were able to publish just having them around for almost three months,” says Campbell. “That really helped prove the case that we really need these guys to stick around.”

Becoming a university leader

Finding where a social media team fits in at a university can be challenging, but IU’s team has become a major player in informing university decisions. “In the past, people valued social and certainly were willing to invest in Sprout with us, but more and more the university has become invested in our team, the data and analytics we provide,” says Norman.

IU Studios is now working on new ways to develop and grow the IU brand, looking at increasing their digital footprint and improving their skills as a team. With Sprout, IU has pushed past vanity metrics and dug into advanced analytics to lay the groundwork for a holistic, impactful strategy that elevates the student experience and connects Hoosiers far and wide.

The post Indiana University uses Sprout to empower decision making appeared first on Sprout Social.

Overview

One of the indelible experiences of college is the sense of community–often the first community you get to choose for yourself. Shared experiences and memories from this formative time extend deep into adulthood and seem to shape the way we view the world for the rest of our lives. For instance, I still can’t drink tequila. But that’s a story for a different time.

Creating that sense of community comes naturally when you’re living, playing and learning together on campus. But what about now, when students and faculty are dispersed, e-learning is the primary shared experience and so much of college life has been rendered obsolete? Now that students, staff and faculty are scattered across the globe, Michigan State University is leaning on the social strategy it’s created to keep those who have left campus–its alumni–connected to the mission, experience and community of MSU.

What you can learn

1. Highlight the wide impact your community is having during the current global situation.

One bright spot in the closing of university campuses has been the dispersal of thousands of like-minded, passionate individuals to communities far and wide. The values they shared on campus now extend to their local communities, and those stories can keep your campus community united from afar. Since the closing of campus in March, MSU has relied on user-generated content (UGC) to share the stories of its now-geographically dispersed students and alumni. Among the most engaging is content that shares the stories of Michigan State Spartans as they work on the frontlines of the pandemic, raise money for underserved groups and generally care for the communities around them.

• Getting started: The network of ‘helpers’ connected to your institution is likely as wide and varied as the effects of COVID-19, and using social to find and share their stories is a great way to remind your audience of the profound impact of your university community on their local communities.

2. Draw attention to your institution’s contributions to the global understanding of the crisis.

Universities are hotbeds of research and advancement, and yours is likely no exception. The world’s smartest science and health minds are focused on diagnosing, fighting and protecting the population from COVID-19, and sharing the stories of how your institution is contributing to our shared knowledge base will inspire pride, hope and connectedness among your university community.

• Getting started: Check in regularly with the communications representatives from each academic department to identify any new research initiatives or results connected to the coronavirus pandemic. While many of these will come from medicine or science, there may also be stories to tell from the work being done in your sociology, history or business schools, among many others.

3. Share university resources that are available off campus.

Like many organizations and businesses, institutions of higher ed have spent the first several weeks of the pandemic reacting to the constraints of shelter-in-place and developing new resources to support its communities from a distance. Often those resources are available to everyone in the university community, but also to a wider community served by your institution. Making all communities aware of the resources available should be a priority in your social planning. To wit: using Sprout’s COVID-19 Featured Listening Topic, we found that the most engaged content for the overall higher ed industry is links (a 135% increase over Q4 2019), showing that there’s a need for relevant content from trusted institutions.

• Getting started: Like the research mentioned above, new community resources are being developed across your campus, by many different departments affiliated with the school. Set up a method to find those resources, either through a content aggregation tool or by reaching out to campus groups, and establish a cadence of sharing them cohesively and clearly with the audiences who need to see them.

The post Social Spotlight: Michigan State University and creating community in this ‘new normal’ appeared first on Sprout Social.