Getting more followers or going viral isnt why campuses invest in social media. They invest because its a primary communication channel used to increase brand awareness and equity, build alumni affinity, recruit students by increasing applications or yield, or any other number of objectives found in a campus strategic plan. The metrics we use to measure it should assess those goals. Yet many social media managers and their CMOs are tied to vanity metrics like followers or engagement rate. When campus social media efforts align with campus priorities, the way we measure social media must change.
Move Beyond Followers and Engagement
If your social media reporting focuses on followers, engagements and impressions from a handful of official campus accounts, it doesn't assess your impact on campus priorities. Rather, it measures how well youre conforming to the metrics social platforms choose to report, regardless of strategic alignment. Vanity metrics dont assess how social media helps or hurts your brand, impacts enrollment, or secures alumni donations. Prioritizing vanity metrics forces your staff to align their social strategy and content creation to the demands of platforms instead of your strategic plan.
Measuring the entire social media conversation about your institution -- not just your contribution to it -- along with direct goal-related conversions prompted by social media content is a better way to assess your social media efforts.
Social Media Metrics to Assess Brand
Angela Polec, vice president of enrollment, marketing and communications at La Salle University, puts it this way: Marketers tend to report in-the-moment metrics from social media such as followers, engagement and reach so we see whats working for us and how our posts and our content are performing. But if your brand is truly what people say about you, she says campus marketing leaders should be concerned with how the conversation forms around us, not just from us.
To measure the entire conversation about your brand on social media, you need to go beyond the analytics within platforms or social media management software. Social listening metrics capture your content as well as what others say about you, whether youre tagged or not. Start with three basic brand metrics.
Jenny Petty, director of enrollment marketing at the University of Wyoming, recently presented social listening metrics to her cabinet and trustees while talking about the impact of the pandemic on their brand. Presenting social listening metrics allowed me to frame our work on social media as managing the brand as an asset. Instead of sharing our most popular posts (which can come across as cutesy), approaching social media this way underscored that what people say about you -- or dont say about you -- is your brand. It shifted leaderships view of marketing from strictly being promoters to being managers of an important asset: our brand.
Typically, 64percent to 88percent of online conversation about colleges and universities occurs on social media, and much of that is earned conversation. Leaving that conversation out of your social media reporting ignores the contribution of word of mouth to your brand.
Tie Social Media to Revenue and Enrollment
Beyond brand, marketers have a responsibility to demonstrate how social media contributes to institutional priorities. A few years ago, Tony Dobies, senior director of marketing at West Virginia University, grappled with this task as his team grew. Likes and followers and pretty pictures don't prove the worth of social media, he said. We had to find something that senior leadership, up to the Board of Governors, could understand. That's money and enrollment.
The WVU team focused on measuring conversions for common recruitment milestones, such as registering for a campus visit or starting an application. This is where most campuses start; other revenue-driving conversions may include donations, housing or dining plans, or special event sales. If you promote these on social media with a link, the conversions happen on your website.
Data to demonstrate impact and value comes from web analytics software (e.g., Google Analytics), not social media platforms. Dobies counsels, You need to know how to use Google Analytics, otherwise you don't have the foundation to get this far. If you don't have conversions set up, you shouldn't be thinking about how to connect it to social yet. If youre new at this, start with the free Google Analytics Academy.
Get buy-in from leadership to identify website actions to track as goals, and work with your web developers or marketing technology team to ensure theyre implemented. Its possible this infrastructure already exists for your website or email marketing; Dobies built on existing practices at WVU. After the foundation is established, you can begin to publish social media content with built-in tracking (i.e., UTM codes) so you can tie efforts to outcomes.
You could -- and should -- go one step further by assigning a dollar value to each goal conversion. Identify how much a campus visit or application is worth to the university, working backward from net tuition revenue using enrollment yield rates (if this is a new concept for you, page 37 of the Enrollment Growth Playbook is a good place to start). For fundraising or ticket sales, use the actual value of the transaction. Assigning a dollar value to website conversions allows you to connect social media efforts to revenue.
In six months during 2019, our organic social media efforts resulted in $200,000 worth of enrollment conversions, Dobies explained. Going forward, well get even more specific to understand how much revenue Instagram Stories generates, or even a specific post. Well also expand beyond enrollment conversions.
Measure What Matters
Social media is part of an integrated marketing strategy, and every campus should treat it as the high-profile, high-potential communication channel it is. This includes assessing social media efforts against core campus goals rather than through a social media platform. Measuring its impact on brand and enrollment allows leadership to make informed decisions about investments in social media staff and tools to impact strategic objectives.
Liz Gross is the founder and CEO of Campus Sonar, a social listening agency dedicated to higher education, and author of Fundamentals of Social Media Strategy: A Guide for College Campuses. Find her on Twitter: @LizGross144.
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We're Measuring Social Media Wrong | Call to Action: Marketing and Communications in Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed