There are higher ed institutions prospering on the platform—attracting the attention of students and alumni alike. Our Social Media Benchmarks Report for Higher Education shows 68% of high school students use social channels to research schools. Our report also reveals 80% of alumni organizations agree that social media has the most impact on engagement. And 41% of school officials can directly attribute increased enrollment to social strategy.

We spoke to several institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bowling Green State University and Ohio University to discuss how they navigate challenges and their tips for building a presence on TikTok. In this article, we’ll also show examples from these colleges and universities leading the way on TikTok for higher education.

3 institutions leading a masterclass on TikTok for higher education

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

MIT has mastered the TikTok niche. Whether it’s showcasing a robot solving a Rubik’s cube in .38 seconds,

Or giving a behind-the-scenes look at student life, the prestigious institution does an excellent job of balancing different types of content to appeal to various audiences.

2. Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) was the first university on the “clock app” in Ohio and has been a leader in higher education TikTok ever since. They are one of the most followed institutions in the state.

Along with original content, BGSU highlights the university’s unique offerings, such as the Carillon Market, which features Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. The market is one of BGSU’s dining options and the technology used in the store enables students to shop for items by scanning a QR code or tapping a debit or credit card upon entry. Students can simply tap, walk in, grab their food and walk out without using a traditional point-of-service system:

“TikTok is a great platform for finding new audiences. We have had so many students from across the country that say they found our university through TikTok and that’s why they chose to enroll in BGSU,” says Brianna Blackburn, Manager of Social Media Strategy, Bowling Green State University.

3. Ohio University

Ohio University (OU) is one of the leading institutions in the nation for engagement on social. OU knows how to connect with their audience while also connecting the university to TikTok trends. For example, in the video below, they share their rendition of the “We’re XYZ,” trend:

They also partnered with their university communications and marketing departments to produce a Halloween themed series featuring OU’s mascot, Rufus the Bobcat:

The challenges to creating a higher ed TikTok strategy

In 2023, several states and university systems banned or restricted TikTok on their campuses, often by blocking access from campus wifi. Our benchmarks report highlights four other common challenges for higher ed organizations on social, including: multiple audience segments, departmental silos, competing interests and ineffective tools. Here’s a quick overview of those challenges:

Multiple audience segments: Colleges and universities have multiple audiences–prospective students, current students, alumni, faculty, fans—and they all want different types of content.

Departmental silos: Managing various audiences becomes more challenging when there are different departments and teams with different focuses and goals.

Competing interests: School rivalries go beyond sports. Practitioners have to understand their competitors’ social performance to benchmark and improve their institution’s social strategy.

Ineffective tools: Without the right tools to measure success, gaining a bird’s eye view of performance and impact becomes even more difficult. Despite these common pain points, there are ways social practitioners can navigate these challenges successfully.

How to build a standout TikTok presence in higher ed

Here are eight tips for building a presence on TikTok in higher education:

1. Identify your bread and butter to create engaging content

Jenny Li Fowler, Director of Social Media Strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommends centering on “bread and butter content”. This bread and butter content refers to a set of content or specific topics that everyone in your community expects and values from you, such as campus photos.

“Every university has its culture and things the community rallies around, like a sports team. For us, numbers are our love language—anything that’s nerdy or quirky we also love,” she says.

However, Fowler also encourages higher ed intuitions to embrace spontaneity as well. For example, MIT is often an answer in jeopardy, so that could be an opportunity to play on a specific moment.

“When your culture intersects with the popular culture or zeitgeist, that’s social media gold. But that is a test of how quickly your team can move and capitalize on those moments. You can create some really creative, powerful and authentic content in these moments,” she says.

“Lean into what makes your institution and your culture unique. Don’t try to do the dances or follow all the trends unless it’s a natural fit. Trends are easier to get wrong than right,” she says.

2. Focus on complementary goals and common interests

Fowler runs the flagship channel, so her primary audience is global. Although prospective students and alumni aren’t her main focus, they’re part of her audience. She explains it’s a positive that various departments have specialized goals and specific audiences because it enables teams to complement each other.

“I think that’s even better that we do because we can point to each other. For example, some departments may have similar niches like cognitive sciences or neurological studies. Some [department labs and centers] are focused on artificial intelligence, while others are centered on robotics or humanities. When people come to me for a consultation, I always recommend them to reach out to people in different departments so they can amplify each other’s work, such as for event promotion,” Fowler says.

“It’s always better to work together than trying to single handedly build a community from scratch. If you have different teams it’s nice to be able to work off of each other and share each other’s content,” she says.

“Our admissions department focuses on prospective students so they get to do a lot of really cool, edgy content that might not speak to my whole broader audience. We have more professionals, educators and academics who follow the flagship channels who appreciate more of our bread and butter content: research, science, robotics. The admissions department gets to do more fun, innovative content—and thank goodness because they’re so good at it.”

3. Embrace and empower partnerships with students

Elise Holbrook, Senior Social Media Specialist, Ohio University says the student team is a large part of their success on TikTok. While Holbrook oversees overall strategy and content approval, the student social team produces content for TikTok and Reels. Juliana Colant, is a senior member of OU’s student social media team and works very closely with Holbrook.

“The student team has always been such an important part of our strategy because students know the university and campus life super well. They have more of a pulse on what is interesting to people their age,” Holbrook says, “If you’re going to be creating content for young people, then young people need to be involved.”

In 2023, BGSU started a brand ambassador program. Blackburn meets with ambassadors biweekly to brainstorm ideas for content. They also create TikTok content during these meetings.

BGSU has leveraged a student social media intern team for years, but in 2023, they launched a brand ambassador program for student micro influencers. The students post on their personal social media channels weekly, but also have the opportunity to learn, brainstorm and create TikToks with the BGSU social team in-person twice a month.

“Having an extra layer of connection with students has tremendously helped us stay in touch with what’s happening on campus and hear new ideas and perspectives from a variety of students—we get amazing TikTok and campaigns ideas from them. It’s also a great learning opportunity for students interested in marketing or public relations,” she says.

4. Add your institution’s own spin

Holbrook and Colant recommend identifying ways you can connect popular content to your institution whether it’s a TikTok trend or sound.

“We try to see how we can blend OU into the TikTok space in a way that’s engaging and fun, but also informational for the audience we’re trying to reach,” Colant says.

For example, the team created several videos during the Barbie movie parody trend, like this one below:

But our social practitioners agree that there’s an art to hopping on trends. Blackburn mentions how they participated in the “I’m X, of course of XYZ” trend on TikTok.

Blackburn explains the “I’m X, of course,” trend was successful because they were able to post when it was first becoming popular on TikTok. Instead of making it just about BGSU students, they made the video about all college students, which captured a much broader audience. She advises teams to act fast when hopping on trends and create content that is relatable to a broad audience.

“The higher education industry is generalized as being slow to change or slow to marketing tactics. But TikTok is a unique opportunity for us to really be different from that stereotype and become early adopters,” she says.

“It’s really easy to just do a quick lip sync to an audio, but what really makes our account stand out is that we have so much variety in content.”

Along with using TikTok sounds, BGSU posts vlogs and skits. She encourages teams to become early adopters of different techniques as well, such as experimenting with editing styles.

“Have fun with editing like zooming in or adding sound effects. Really mix it up, see how your audience responds, and keep experimenting. Taking thoughtful and strategic risks as a public institution help you stand out from your peers. So that’s been our approach as a social-first focused brand,” Blackburn says.

“It’s more important to us that we create solid, consistent content even if that means posting something that’s different than anything we’ve done before or not exactly ‘perfect’ in our eyes. We always strive for progress over perfection. TikTok growth is about being all in—it’s just a matter of going for it,” she says.

5. Have fun while leaning into your audience’s interests

Holbrook explains there’s a tendency in higher ed to feel like the content has to be serious because teams have a brand to uphold, but she encourages teams to step outside their comfort zone.

“A bigger part of our strategy has been not taking ourselves too seriously. To some degree you want to present yourself as a legitimate academic institution. But people in the [target audience] of college students don’t want to see a brand–whether it’s a college or any brand—be super serious all the time,” Holbrook says.

Fowler encourages social teams in higher education to have fun when building a presence on TikTok.

“Some of the most engaging types of content are those that allow you to tie back to your community or your culture. Those are the most fun,” Fowler says.

For example, MIT created a Barbie box :

“Even just calling your audience Barbies and saying ‘Hey, my nerd Barbies,’ works,” Fowler says.

“I used to joke that one of the most difficult decisions I make a day is which emoji to use. It’s social media. It’s supposed to be fun and sometimes I think we forget that fundamental fact,” Fowler says.

6. Build community through consistency

Colant says there’s two key things to remember with TikTok strategy: consistency and community. Consistency is important because TikTok isn’t a platform where you can just post once a month and then expect to see a great growth or response rate. You need to consistently publish content for your audience, along with viewers who aren’t following you yet, but see your content on their For You Page. She also speaks to how TikTok is often associated with the chase of virality, but building community is more important.

“Getting a million views on every single video would be awesome, but it’s about building a consistent community. We want to connect with potential students, current students and alumni, so think about how you can best connect with the current community while also receiving great engagement.”

7. Become best-in-class by analyzing performance and competitors

Holbrook says showing proof points of both quantitative and qualitative can help show the “why” behind your TikTok strategy. For example, by pulling reports where you can view relevant engagement metrics like reshares, comments and likes, you get a quantitative sense of performance. She also recommends looking to the TikTok comments to see how the content resonates with your audience to gain a qualitative sense of your posts.

Along with reviewing OU’s TikTok performance, the team has a page dedicated to following other colleges, universities and competitor institutions to see how different schools approach content.

“How are they covering their football games? Could we do something similar or different? You can really learn and grow by looking at your competitors,” Colant says.

Beyond competitor institutions, the team pays attention to posts from content creators, influencers and brands.

“That’s a really important thing to consider on [short-form video platforms] like TikTok and Reels that are competing for people’s views. How do you get on the level of those brands that are always getting the trending videos,” Holbrook says.

“I like to look at TikTok strategy as being a student of the platform. We’re always studying the platform and listening. We avoid posting just to post because we listen first and see how the general conversation is going,” Blackburn says.

8. Create partnerships with TikTok education influencers

Fowler says higher ed institutions have a built-in group of micro-influencers because current and incoming students have never known life without social media. Today’s undergraduates aren’t just scholars—they’re content creators and influencers. And of course alumni and fans have social presences as well.

“You have ambassadors who already love you and are your real fans. People get excited when their favorite institution reaches out. Many students have their own YouTube channels with several thousand followers. To me, that’s a micro-influencer. Tap into those people and pitch an opportunity to work together,” she says.

Along with using micro-influencers within their ambassador program, BGSU collaborated with their first influencer, @eliemagic in 2023. He travels to campuses across Ohio to interview students and he also has a series dedicated to Greek life and student athletes. BGSU reached out after he announced he was coming to campus, and they worked to accomplish something he couldn’t do on his own: interview a professor.

“He came in and surprised the class, so that was a cool experience to see the shock on everyone’s faces because he’s very recognizable in Ohio,” she says.

Just like TikTok trends, the higher education social media playbook is dynamic, but these tips can help you develop your presence on TikTok.

Higher education TikTok: Foster connection beyond the For You Page

The common piece of advice from all three institutions? Focus on community and connection on your TikTok and other channels to establish rapport with your audience segments. If you want to learn more ways to use TikTok for education, get inspired with our list of 15 ways to use social media for education.

The post 3 Institutions leading a masterclass on TikTok for higher education appeared first on Sprout Social.

Because we believe in the power of social media to make nearly anything easier, we will share 15 ways to use social media for education, based on insights shared with us from top institutions.

Benefits of social media in education

Here are our top three benefits of using social media in education:

Benefit 1: Extends learning opportunities

Social media unleashes more learning opportunities. Online classes and remote jobs are the new norm, so teaching students to work from a distance becomes a necessity for digital literacy and preparing them for their careers. Social media platforms support educators in various ways from sharing announcements to holding live lectures.

Benefit 2: Create connections with students and alumni

Social provides a way for institutions to quickly and directly communicate with students, faculty, staff and alumni, fostering connections across various audiences. Social content can attract prospective students, keep parents informed, grow alumni networks, promote on-campus events and more.

Focusing on nurturing community and publishing engaging content can also help increase enrollment. According to our Higher Education Social Media Benchmarks for 2023 report, 41% of school officials can directly attribute increased enrollment to social strategy.

For example, Keele University said their campus photos on Instagram help students solidify their college decision. One student came to the university because she saw their posts on Facebook and it helped confirm her decision, later becoming a digital ambassador for the school.

Benefit 3: Build brand identity

Social supports and amplifies university branding. University marketing teams use social media to maintain a positive brand reputation for their institutions. With the right strategy, colleges and universities can attract more students, increase endowments, promote events or initiatives and improve alumni relations.

Social media in the classroom

From preschool to college, there are so many methods for using social media in the classroom to communicate and educate. Here are seven ways to use social media in the classroom across platforms:

1. Use posts to broadcast updates and alerts

Instructors and colleges can meet students where they are by incorporating social media platforms they’re likely already familiar with like Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter).

Have students follow a class Facebook Page or join a Facebook Group to view posts about course updates, homework assignments and tests. Universities can have publicly accessible pages dedicated to specific schools or departments that students can see even if they aren’t active on Facebook.

When using social media for education, it’s important to maintain a professional boundary. Email students a direct link to the Facebook Group for access and avoid sending friend requests. Groups are the perfect “home base,” especially for online courses because it makes it easy to connect with students. Similarly, instructors and departments can use Posts on X to keep students informed.

2. Use live streaming for lectures and discussions

Instructors can use Facebook Groups, Instagram Live, YouTube Live or LinkedIn Live to stream lectures and facilitate more accessible learning. If a student can’t come to the lecture hall, they can join online or review later. Adding live captions helps students who may be deaf or hard of hearing, non-native speakers, or learn visually. And platforms like Instagram and YouTube allow live streams to be recorded, providing students with review material for midterms and finals season.

Recorded live streams also widen the institution’s reach and authority by making lectures available to scholars and professors from other colleges, states or countries.

3. Use X for class updates and more

X is a great option for providing quick updates and reminders to students. Teachers can create a single handle per class and reuse it every year, or they can create a new handle each school year. Use X threads to share resources like practice quizzes, interesting perspectives or thought-provoking quotes to foster critical thinking. Hashtags can mark specific discussions or chats with guest speakers.

4. Create a class blog for discussions and cross-channel learning

Blogs are another great outlet for incorporating social media in the classroom. Students can link to the class blog on other social channels. For example, a student might share a photo from their visual essay on LinkedIn to attract the attention of recruiters for job or internships. Using blogs as a semester-long assignment can improve students’ short-form writing and critical thinking.

Don’t feel limited to just an English or writing class; this use of social media in education can be transferred across all subjects. There are also several platforms professors can use to create class blogs, such as Tumblr, Medium or WordPress. The course syllabus, updates and resources can be shared on the blog as well.

5. Use Instagram for digital storytelling

Have students practice storytelling on Instagram by creating class-specific accounts where they can present photos or graphics (and delete them once the course is over, if they so choose). This can work especially well in visual-heavy classes: Have photojournalism students post essays or challenge the social media marketing class to create a faux-brand campaign.

6. Create a class-specific Pinterest board

Educators can use Pinterest to prepare and organize resources, lesson plans and worksheets for their classes in one place. They can also set up Pinterest boards for each of their classes and save pins that are relevant to lessons.

Create boards according to class or subject, and create sub-topic boards for weekly units, projects or worksheets. Pinterest can also be useful for students to curate a digital bibliography for research projects, papers or group assignments. Students can pin websites, books or videos to a board on a single topic and refer back to it when it’s time to write an essay or thesis.

7. Prep for post-graduation and create alumni relationships

LinkedIn can help current students develop networking skills, craft their personal brand and connect with alumni. Flexing these career muscles could help them earn internships, gain mentors and secure job offers before they walk across the stage on graduation day.

Institutions can use LinkedIn for university colleges as well.  For example, a business school may have several private LinkedIn Groups for regional alumni chapters to connect them with students and faculty for internships, fundraising, volunteer opportunities and events.

Encouraging students to post relevant articles, projects and research, internship experiences and other academic accomplishments helps the university develop social proof on the platform. This is also an excellent example of the importance of incorporating advocacy into your social strategy.

Social media for education marketing

Just as there were many ways to use social media in the classroom, there are also many uses for social media in education marketing. Social media marketing can help if you’re looking to reach a larger audience for your college or university. Let’s dive into how social media can empower education marketing.

8. Leverage TikTok creators and influencers for user-generated content

Although many public universities have banned TikTok from campus Wi-fi, some educators and institutions embrace the app to educate and connect with students. Student and teacher influencers can provide user-generated content that satisfies a prospective student’s desire to see authentic content from their peers and future professors.

For example, Chapman University professor @itsmattprince went viral after challenging his class to earn 1 million likes on a TikTok video in exchange for canceling their final:

Fun, yet real-world applications like this illustrate the power of social influence—plus who doesn’t love a canceled final?

9. Include social media links on your school website

In the Higher Education Social Media Benchmarks for 2023 report, we found that 68% of high school students use social channels to research schools. Many parents and prospective students will check a school’s website first if they’re interested, and offering even more ways to follow the school creates a different insight into campus life.

Make it easy for parents and students to find your school’s social media profiles by adding links to the website’s main navigation or creating a social media directory that houses them all in one place.

10. Give a glimpse into student life through photo and video

If you want to attract new students and parents to your school, share photos of campus events to showcase what they could expect. Use short-form video like Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts to help prospective students envision themselves attending college there.

Highlighting events, sports, extracurriculars and the beauty of campus can make your school stand out from the rest. While school and university websites tend to follow the same mold, social media allows you to be more unique and casual like this Barbenheimer-inspired post from the University of Georgia:

11. Create alumni community groups

Many alumni want to remain involved with their alma mater after graduation. Creating a dedicated community via Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups can increase engagement.

For example, the University of Newcastle has over 148,000 alumni. Their team features current students, staff and alumni to amplify the career opportunities that manifest from being part of their community.

Alumni groups, groups for different graduating classes or departments, and groups for different extracurriculars and organizations allow former and current students to engage and meet others with common interests. Take a look at our alumni engagement best practices guide to learn more ways to keep the school spirit flowing.

12. Incorporate a social media crisis strategy

How would you communicate to the entire campus during an emergency? Whether it’s a fire, tornado or other immediate campus emergency, a social media crisis plan can help institutions proactively prepare. Keep parents and students updated on the situation by sharing information about the crisis and if authorities are involved. Many campuses have automated messaging alerts set up, but using social also enables people to be updated in real time.

Institutions can use social listening, which involves analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand, to aid with public relations crisis management plans. Seneca College leveraged Sprout’s capabilities a few years ago when 12,000 staff members went on strike. Using Brand Keywords and the Smart Inbox, the social media team was able to sort through and respond to a deluge of inbound feedback from concerned students.

13. Use chatbots to support students outside of office hours

In our higher education social media playbook, we talk about the importance of social customer service. Using automated replies or chatbots can help the student body get their questions answered immediately, or at least guide them to a solution faster.

Keele University used chatbots via Sprout’s Bot Builder to respond immediately to common questions about courses and bursary information. In the five months after using chatbots, nearly 500 conversations addressed a variety of topics from housing applications to international student services.

14. Iterate social strategy to create student-centric content

Using social media for education allows educators and marketers to meet students where they are by connecting on channels they use everyday. Social creates an opportunity for institutions to be more even more student-centric. But to keep students engaged, institutions will need to produce content that caters to the wants and needs of their audience(s).

If you want to manage your institution’s social channels successfully, you’ll need to iterate and improve your strategy by reviewing the top and lowest performing content.

Dartmouth College uses Sprout’s Sent Messages report to determine content performance and iterate their overall social strategy as needed. After reviewing which posts performed well, they schedule new posts with similar content to inform their content calendar.

15. Manage your communities all under one roof

Social media empowers universities to bring their various audiences together. Many institutions have an extensive community of prospective and current students, faculty, staff and alumni, but this causes a common pain point: decentralization.

Since colleges and universities have multiple social media accounts, it can be difficult to manage them all seamlessly. However, using a social media management software centralizes multiple networks in one place, so overseeing various accounts becomes more manageable and scalable.

Texas A&M University, one of the largest public universities in the nation, uses social media to connect with these various communities. The university has hundreds of departments, 16 colleges and 19 NCAA sports, so using a social media management tool is essential. Their social team uses Sprout’s publishing suite to discuss strategy, collaborate on content creation and provide feedback to interns all on 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 X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

A tool like Sprout Social can help make social media management a breeze, regardless of whether you’re a solo marketer or a full marketing department. Multiple users can use the Sprout platform to create content with consistent messaging and schedule posts across networks at the best time using our ViralPost® feature.

And the Post Performance report takes the guesswork out of identifying what content resonates because teams can pinpoint top posts and view engagement across channels.

Sprout enables you to monitor and manage multiple accounts across different networks, which is ideal for educational institutions. Each department or teacher at your school might have their own separate social media accounts for specific information, and a social media management tool can help you ensure the right posts are going out on each of these accounts.

And if there is news or content relevant to multiple departments, Sprout enables users to share the same content across multiple profiles with a single click.

Start using social media for education

Using social media for education goes beyond the classroom because it helps educators shape a modern holistic learning experience, build community and establish academic authority.

Take some of these ideas for a test drive, and sign up for a free Sprout Social trial to help you manage it all.

The post 15 ways to use social media for education appeared first on Sprout Social.

Current students, prospective students, alums, athletes and fans all want something different from your social presence. Use this benchmark report to guide your strategy as you meet each of your audiences where they are. 

In this report, you’ll find:

• Need-to-know benchmarks to inform your social media strategy
• Key insights on care expectations specific to social 
• Advice to help your institution make the grade on social

Social data can enrich your marketing strategy with unfiltered insights on everything from the big game to the upcoming school year. Download this benchmark report and inform your approach with the metrics today. 

The post Higher Education Social Media Benchmarks for 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

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.

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 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.

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 Social Index™ 2020, 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.

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.

Use of Twitter nomenclature across Sprout refers to newly rebranded X platform and related terminology.

The post How to manage multiple Twitter accounts easily 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.

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