Social media is changing the game in terms of colleges’ and universities’ visibility and recruiting efforts. Thanks to platforms like Facebook, YouTube and blogs, students no longer rely only on face-to-face events such as open houses and campus tours to learn more about prospective schools. In fact, most students’ presence at these events is usually due to a first online introduction with your school and its offerings. Yet, many colleges and universities continue to rely on Student Ambassadors to help them exclusively with these on-campus recruiting efforts. They keep students out of their online recruiting efforts, missing out on one of the most powerful engagement strategies available to them.

Why a Social Media Student Ambassador Team?

Social Media Student Ambassadors are an essential tool to implement your Social Media Strategy. They can help your college:

• Engage with fellow students on social media platforms: whether they are looking to transfer to your school or start a brand new program, prospects just want to know they will be a good fit for your school. Involving current students in your social media activities (replying to tweets, answering questions on Facebook, etc.) is one of the best ways to ensure your prospects and students get the most out of their interactions with your school.
• Create student-centered content: Who knows your school and its strengths better than your current students? Student blogs are the best way to offer complementary, student-focused information to prospects (as opposed to school-sponsored advertisement). First-year or graduate Ambassadors could be very helpful in providing information about the career services or the programs your school offers.
• Highlight your school’s specificity: Any successful social media strategy aims at making your school stand out. Creating a fun, engaging contest or viral video requires focusing on what makes your school special. Your students may be able to pinpoint elements that are not obvious to your marketing team and that you may be able to leverage to create successful, engaging campaigns.
• Watch your competition in terms of recruitment and retention: By the time they attend your school, students will have come across many other school’s campaigns. Your Ambassadors will be able to tell you why they were attracted by some, turned off by others and why they eventually chose your school.

Gather your Team

1. Start by gathering 3-4 highly motivated students who are passionate about social media. Ask faculty to approach students about the program, see if your recruitment services have been approached by students who are interested in doing some work in social media. Make sure to choose natural leaders who are both proactive and passionate about the school.
2. Think Diversity: your Social Media Student Ambassadors should be representative of the population attending your school: diversity of background, of gender, race, but also living situation (on-campus, off campus), and of year attended (freshman, senior, graduate).
3. Establish clear rules:
   • Will your Ambassadors be rewarded with money or credits? Your school may create a social media program through which students could apply for a position as a Social Media Student Ambassador.
   • What type of content is expected? Will they have freedom of topic and tone?  Are there any privacy issues that should be discussed before final approval?
   • How often should your Ambassadors post? Are missed deadlines acceptable?
   • How often will they meet? Who will they meet with? Marketing or recruitment?
4. Provide training for your Social Media Student Ambassadors: help your Ambassadors meet the goals you will have created for them. Provide them with tools and skills to help you be successful in your recruiting efforts. This may include WordPress workshops, video editing classes, production tutorials, etc.
5. Try and fail: don’t expect it to be perfect right away. Your team’s learning curve may be steep but you will gather paramount knowledge to attract and retain your targeted student audiences in the long term.

Here is a great presentation by Mallory Wood about the various stages through which a school can develop its Social Media Student Ambassador program.

What is your school doing to integrate students in its social media strategy?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Higher Education Marketing, Recruitment Solutions, Social Media

As we’ve highlighted in the past, there have been numerous changes at Facebook lately. However, the bulk of these changes was only adopted across the board on March 30th, 2012. Since then, your school’s Facebook profile has featured the social network’s new format.

Beyond its new esthetics, the new Timeline format has changed the metrics for gauging a popular Facebook page. Before Timeline, it was all about getting fans. Now, the important thing is generating likes and comments. This means that your new Facebook profile page has to have regular content, lively and frequent discussions and a strong visual and multimedia component – all of which require more involvement and engagement on your end.

Don’t panic!

We’ve drafted a handy ebook that describes Timeline’s features and offers a few suggestions for your school to leverage the new Facebook format: Facebook Timeline for Colleges and Universities.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Higher Education Marketing, Higher Education Marketing Ebooks, Social Media

Google Analytics is a powerful analytics tool that can give your school the chance to see, in real time, how your marketing is performing, where it is succeeding and where it can be improved. By properly setting up and maintaing Google Analytics, you will have the capability to track and analyze this information, which will remove the guesswork from your decision making and maximize your ROI. However, when you fully take advantage of everything Google Analytics has to offer, you can also diversify your marketing initiatives.

How Can Google Analytics Diversify Your Marketing?

You might think Google Analytics is only useful for measuring the effectiveness of banner ads, Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click marketing campaigns, but this is only part of what it covers. Apart from offline marketing (including newspapers, radio and TV ads) Google Analytics can also help you optimize the following marketing initiatives and channels:

Mobile Marketing
As we have discussed in the past, the future is increasingly mobile. If your school has developed a mobile website, Google Analytics can help you track and measure its user activity. This requires that you paste Google Analytics tracking code on each page that you want to track. Google Analytics then provides you with data on mobile visits to your website.

What’s more, you can also use Google Analytics to track traffic to your regular website from mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets. All traffic from mobile devices can be viewed under the “Mobile” section in the “Audience” tab of your Analytics account. This is then further divided into “Overview” and “Devices”.

Social Media Marketing
Each social media platform you use has an analytical tool (Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics to help you measure your prospects’ and students’ engagement. By adding a few advanced segment filters to your Google Analytics, you can see the percentage of traffic that comes to your site from social media, and, you can see what this traffic did once they got there.

Google Analytics can also compare social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), allowing you to understand which one drives the most traffic, has the best lead conversion rates, bounce rates and time spent on your site. Clearly, this kind of information can be invaluable when you are devising recruiting, marketing and social media strategies.

In addition, Google’s Social Plug-in Analytics can help you analyse how users engage with any social plug-in that you incorporate into your school’s website (including a Facebook Like button, Google’s +1 button and Twitter’s Tweet button). Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the plug-in will provide a number of reports, including:

• Engagement
  This will tell you the number of pages viewed per visit, average time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics for visits that included and did not include social actions.
• Action 
  This will allow you to compare the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Likes, etc) for each social source and social source-action combination.
• Pages
  This report allows you to compare the number of actions on each page of your site.

Email Marketing
If your school offers an email newsletter (and it should) or any other method of email marketing, you will need to know the effectiveness of this tactic. There are services out there that can tell you how many clicks ever campaign has received, but it won’t tell you what happens after that initial click. Google Analytics can help you fill in these gaps, letting you know where visitors are coming from and what interested them. This information is extremely important.

What other marketing initiatives have you measured with Google Analytics? Do you feel it is more useful with some than others?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Higher Education Marketing

In our last post, we discussed why creating a student blog is a great way to stand out from your competition. We showed how the theme and format of this blog is closely intertwined with your global social media strategy and how you wish to position this new blog. Now that you have a theme for a student blog, how do you make it a reality?

Here are the first 3 steps to take to create an effective student blog:

1. Choose the right Ambassador

The answer to “Who should write for our school’s student blog?” should be found when defining the type of student you want to reach. A student interested in your most popular program? A student going back to school after years spent working? You will need to identify your school’s personas (link) to answer these questions precisely.
Once you have defined the target you wish to reach, ask professors about students who fit the description and who would be interested in a mutually beneficial relationship with the school. These students should be personable, have strong written skills, enjoy telling stories but most importantly, they should be willing to tell things the way they are.

2. Create Editorial Guidelines
Once you have chosen your Ambassador, have him/her sit down with the head of the Communication Department to present your school’s general social media strategy and the part played by the student blog in it. Together, they should go over privacy and legal limits (signing an agreement about what is acceptable and unacceptable on the blog is recommended), post formats, responses and monitoring of comments. They should also draft a list of subjects to cover in the blog. Such subjects may include:
*what the student loves about your school, what disappoints him/her, what has been a great surprise
*general life as a student
*problems with juggling personal life, sometimes a professional life and school
*views on the industry
*more trivial reports about life on campus or even the weather (as it gives also an idea of life on campus)
*community events and community news
*open houses and seminars
*announcements, graduations, student awards, etc.

Keep in mind that these editorial guidelines are just that. The student should be responsible for all the content and there should be no pre-screening of his/her posts.

After the launch, these meetings should occur on a regular basis to give the student an opportunity to voice concerns or difficulties.

3. Commit
The last key to making this student blog a success is to commit to delivering good quality posts on a regular basis, at least once a week. This is a team effort. Your school will have to make sure your Ambassador has everything he/she needs to do his/her work well. This will include helping him/her build an audience by publicizing the blog: add a button on the homepage of your website, link the blog to your profiles on all the social media platforms.

What have you tried to make your student blog a success?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing Tips, Higher Education Marketing, Social Media

As schools rely increasingly on social media to interact with prospects and students, blogs have taken the backseat in many schools’ online marketing strategy. Blogs are pivotal tools in building a strong social media presence: a blog improves SEO results, ensures ownership of the content they post elsewhere, and gives prospects an extensive and researchable database about the school. Most schools are aware of these benefits and have launched “official blogs” to enjoy them. Schools’ “official blogs” are like any other corporate blog: they feature news about the institution, posts about programs and useful tips for all students, announcements, etc. These blogs focus on students, but their voice and content are neutral and controlled by the school. In fact, in most schools, Admissions or Marketing departments are in charge of developing the content of those blogs. This leads at best to generic blogging and, at worst, to blatant advertisement for the school, with little for students to take away.

This “official” approach to blogging may actually be hurting your marketing efforts and keep your blog from fulfilling its main goal: give insight into your students’ day-to-day life and stand out from competition. That is why some schools have decided to leverage their students’ expertise to tell prospects and current students about their programs and life on campus through blogs written exclusively by students for students. Why?

A mutually beneficial activity
As opposed to generic blogging, student blogging is a mutually beneficial activity for your school and the students taking part in it.
For the school:
- It offers an authentic presentation of what your school and campus are like and how your students feel about it. No one knows what type of information your prospects are looking for better than your students or graduates, so why not give them the opportunity to talk directly to your audience?
- Many schools are reluctant to host student blogs as they feel they would be handing their school’s image over to people who do not have stakes in their school. But according to officials in schools using student blogs, the risk is limited and worth taking as it brings trust from prospects that are constantly solicited by advertisement. Indeed, “[students] may be more inclined to trust a school they think is willing to show them real campus life.”

Students can also greatly benefit from such a blog:
- Depending on the angle of the blog, students could have the opportunity to write about courses and subjects they feel passionate about, thus becoming experts in their subject matter. A blog will also give them an audience of peers and potential job-related contacts.
- Being trusted with a blog will reinforce ownership in learning; encourage research skills as well as technology skills

A great tool to stand out from competition
A student blog is a great way to make your school stand out. You have a very active campus life? You offer a unique class in your region? You have a great apprenticeship program? These are all great themes for a student blog.
Some schools share official and non-official news about the institution on the official blog and launch separate student blogs for foreign students, freshman, or students of a class. There is a student blog to be created for anything that makes your school special. Check out what some schools have chosen to do here, here and here.

Whatever its theme may be, your student blog will have to have clear goals and be integrated into your global social media strategy: what is your strategy on each social media platform? How do you position yourself compared to your competition? How could your blog offer something your competition cannot offer? What would your student blog cover as opposed to your “official” blog or to your other social media presence (Facebook page, for instance)? You will need to answer precisely these questions to be able to create a relevant and effective student blog.

What are your experiences with student blogs?

AT HEM, we create holistic social media strategies to optimize all of our clients’ online marketing efforts. We take a hard look at their social media presence, offer a thorough competitive analysis and deliver easy, actionable recommendations. Call us today to learn more about this new offer!

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Higher Education Marketing, Social Media

A recent study shows that YouTube is one of college students’ favorite platforms to look for information and entertainment. It is a unique opportunity for your school to catch prospects’ attention and give them a direct feel of your campus, your faculty and student body.

Here are 4 tips to make sure that these great videos are actually easy to find and ensure your school’s ranking on search engines.

1.         Optimize your channel name

YouTube should not be your only presence online. It should be part of an integrative social media strategy. That is why it has to be integrated into your overall branding efforts. Ideally, your name should be the same as the one you use on other platforms. For best SEO results, it is ideal to have a word in your name that could relate to any of the videos you will be posting. Choose this name carefully, as you will not be able to change it later. Get started with customization here.

2.         Optimize your tags 

As with text posts, correct tagging will go a long way for your school to rank high on search engines. The key here is to have a short list of keywords for your school (link back to Keyword post). Don’t forget to make sure one of these keywords is “video”.

• Titles: put keywords first, and branding at the end.
• Description: include keywords in the descriptive text, as well as subscription and links to your channel page. Include both broad and specific keywords. Place the keywords you want to carry the most weight first. YouTube recommends writing 12 tags or more.
•  Transcript: Include a full video transcript as it is another opportunity to add text with your keywords.
• Annotations: make sure you index the content added to the video via the Annotations option.
• Video file name: Rename manually videos to avoid the Video1. It would be another lost opportunity to improve your SEO.

3.         Constantly post new content

YouTube rewards frequency, so publishing content regularly is the best way to ensure a higher ranking. To continuously create new content, keep a list of video ideas close by. This list can include:

• School and Program Videos such as presentation videos, a word from the President, graduation ceremonies; graduates discussing the benefits of their training at your school; the video of the week, etc.
• Career videos: success stories, careers available with degrees from your school.
•  Community videos with events on campus; involvement of your school in your local community (geographic community); tutorials about a specific subject your school specializes in (learning community).

4.         Strategically promote your videos

 Embed your videos

If your school has a blog or traditional website, make sure you embed your YouTube videos in them. (Make sure you do not  promote your competition with the Related Videos).

Link, link, link

• Share all your YouTube content automatically to Facebook and Twitter.
• Go back under YouTube account setting and click on “Blog Setup.”  This will allow you to link your blog with your account and thus post your videos on your blog directly in just a few simple clicks.
• Link your channel and videos to your other social networking profiles, your email signature, and various presentations.

Get involved in the YouTube community

The more “Likes” they will get, the higher your videos will appear.

YouTube algorithm loves videos that bring traffic to other videos or channels, so the best way to rank high is to become part of the YouTube community.

• Add a link to your school’s website, and a link to the channel in all the social media platforms.
• Leave comments on popular videos in your niche. Comment early so your comments will appear at the top and will be viewed by your core audience within the first hours following the post.
• Create campaigns to encourage comments. As long as your channel does not get thousands of viewers every day, respond to each and every comment. Building comments early also helps increase the video’s ranking in search.
• Join Groups
• Advertise on YouTube

What have you been doing to improve your school’s positioning in social media?

The conversation continues

The YouTube Creator Playbook is the best resource for anyone trying to improve their marketing efforts.

Check out the 10 Commandments of Video Marketing from Tina Fotopoulous on WebSEO Analytics and How TO: Boost Your SEO with a YouTube Channel from Mitchell Harper of BigCommerce.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Higher Education Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Youtube

Higher Education Marketing founder Philippe Taza recently spoke at the 2011 BCCCA Conference in British Columbia. Phil discussed the increasingly important role that Google Analytics plays in today’s education marketing.

The following is Phil’s in-depth presentation of what Google Analytics can measure, best practices and tips to configure Google Analytics. It focuses on helping colleges improve their ROI and increase the number of leads generated from their websites and online marketing initiatives, such as social media.

BCCCA Google Analytics for Improved Lead Generation

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Analytics-Driven Marketing, Google Analytics, Higher Education Marketing, Student Recruitment News

Millennials, as the generation born after 1980 are often called, are far less likely to have land-line phones than the generation that came before them. They are, however, very likely to a presence on Facebook and Twitter. This is a significant shift from generations past, and it’s forcing higher education institutions to change their recruitment strategies. Do you really expect to connect with these students with traditional print and radio ads? No, you need to engage them through the use of social media and new communications tools (like mobile devices).

To illustrate this, let’s look at the most recent study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. They were the first to conduct statistically-significant studies on the usage of social media by US colleges and universities, with a study released in 2007-2008. Their man focus was on was how colleges or universities should now be recruiting.

Note: the study involved schools in all 50 states, with both public and private institutions and a wide range in average tuition. The findings are based on 456 interviews and are valid within the range of +/- 4%.

The 2010-2011 study found that:

• 100% of colleges and universities studied are using some form of social media (This is up from 95% the year before, and 61% in 2007-2008)
• 98% of colleges and universities have a Facebook page (up from 87%)
• 84% have a school Twitter account (up from 59%)
• 66% have a blog (up from 51%)

Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Twitter are the main social media tools for US higher education institutions, and they all saw big increases. The growth of blogging also points to more and more schools trying to integrate all of these social media platforms into one seamless strategy. Often the school blog is at the heart of these strategies. Interestingly, other sectors of business have reported a leveling off of blogging, but this shows that more and more by colleges and universities are turning to their blogs.

• Podcasting is being used at 41% of schools (from 22%)
• 47% of admissions professionals are using LinkedIn (up from 16%)
• Only 8% of schools are using MySpace (down from 16%)
• 85% of schools are using YouTube

This is the first time that YouTube made an appearance in this study, and, together with the increase in podcasting, it’s clear that schools are using these tools to try to represent the experience of being on campus.

What does all this mean? It means that schools in the US are well aware of the technology being used by their target audiences, and they have been very quick to adapt. Most are now using an integrated social media approach to increase their share of social media voice, and connect with prospective students, alumni and staff. This approach means maintaining and monitoring a school blog, Facebook profile, and accounts on Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and more.

What is your school doing to increase its share of social  media voice?

Contact us today to find out more about social media monitoring and engagement.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Higher Education Marketing, Social Media

Google Analytics should be the very foundation of your website design, development and marketing initiatives. It doesn’t, however, have to be limited there. Google Analytics can also play a fundamental role in tracking and analyzing another increasingly important aspect of prospective student involvement: mobile use.

As we have mentioned, more and more people are experiencing the Web from mobile devices (they will, in fact, pass laptops this year for Web usage), and this means that more and more prospective students are searching for programs and schools through their smartphone. Mobile-friendly websites and apps are fundamental. However, it’s equally important to get a good sense of just how many prospects are interacting with your website this way. The good news is that Google Analytics can be used to manage these mobile searchers and leads, allowing you to track visits and time on your site from smart phones and tablets.

This measurement and analysis is especially important when mobile strategies are being put into place — how do you know what to do if you have no real way of understanding how mobile visitors are using these resources? The first thing that needs to be asked: how many people visit my site using mobile devices? Is there anything unique about this segment of users? And what can you do to optimize your mobile offerings for these users?

There are two separate ways to track mobile users with Google Analytics. The first method involves creating a data filter to include only traffic from mobile devices. For a step-by-step breakdown on how to set up a data filter, see the Google Analytics blog post on the subject.

The next method was highlighted by Bryson Meunier, who recommends creating custom segments to compare mobile traffic to desktop traffic. To do this:

• Go to Advanced Segments
• Select create new custom segment
• Select Systems under Dimensions and select screen resolution. Drag and drop the screen resolution box into the box that says dimension or metric.
• For the condition drop down, select “Matches regular expression” and enter the following value: (^[1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|^3[0-1][0-9]|^320)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]$|4[0-7][0-9]$|480$)
• Name the segment Mobile Visitors (or anything else you prefer)
• Select Create Segment.

This will cover mobile screen resolutions and let you compare mobile versus desktop users. You’ll also get an idea of mobile specific keywords used in search engines on mobile devices, and conversion rate from mobile users.

For more information on Google Analytics, contact Higher Education Marketing today.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Google Analytics, Higher Education Marketing

We are proud to now offer a free technical website audit. A comprehensive website audit provides a wealth of data and helps the implementation and focus of Web analytics. This approach can give education marketers a clear understanding of what their brand and site needs, shedding light on how to build a new brand that better resonates with prospective students, alumni, faculty and special interest groups.

Individually tailored for each school website, our comprehensive strategic web audits can determine the competitive landscape and provide insight into the current performance, search engine ranking, online lead generation and calls to action of a school’s website or program webpages. An audit can also enable site-specific problem solving and provide easy to implement adjustments that will improve rank and usability and increase online visibility. This is beneficial for a whole host of Web and online marketing tactics and issues, including SEO, Google Analytics, social media or a combination of these tools and tactics.

To request a free website audit from Higher Education Marketing, please click here. 

CATEGORIES: Newsletter

Tags: Higher Education Marketing, Website Audit