While most business schools devote ample energy to their online presence, many don’t take full advantage of the opportunities offered by social media for business schools. Even business schools with a strong social presence often use soft engagement strategies that don’t funnel prospects through the admissions process as effectively as possible.
Since social media offers an image of your school that many potential applicants consider more authentic than other channels, it is a powerful way to connect with prospects and offer them information of real value, exponentially increasing their chances of applying.
Read on to learn how your school can create social media strategies that have a tangible impact on your business school’s admissions process.
Consider your Business Student Personas
Before creating your social media marketing strategy, consider the students you often encounter in the admissions process: who they are, what they are looking for in a business school, and why they would be interested in yours. The better you understand your prospective student base, the easier it will be to create relevant content for those you’re trying to reach.
Conceptualizing your prospects is the first step in creating student ‘personas,’ which can help you define and shape your social media strategy.
For schools, personas are representations of typical potential applicants and include common characteristics such as their age, gender, location, academic and professional background, and interests. It is also helpful to identify each persona’s motivations and challenges when deciding which school to attend.
Example: Meet The Bachelor’s Candidate: an ambitious secondary school graduate seeking an enriching college experience and an internationally accredited degree.
Personas can help numerous aspects of your overall marketing strategy, but they’re especially helpful when it comes to social media for business schools. Since social media is a mostly indirect marketing tactic—in other words, students are coming to you instead of you reaching out to them—you need content that’s as relevant as possible to make a real impact on the channel.
Your personas will help you figure out what your prospective students would find most useful, interesting, and appealing on social media. From there, you can determine what types of content to post, what resources to offer, and, most importantly, how you should present your school on different social networks.
Set Your Business School’s Social Media Goals
Creating posts, sharing content, and engaging with users on social media is easy, but doing this aimlessly won’t generate long-term results.
However, if you create a strategy based on well-thought-out goals, your social channels will increase the benefit you get from the channel over time.
These goals can take many forms, ranging from softer outcomes like building awareness of your brand to better engaging your online community to more tangible results like driving increased inquiries and applications. Which outcomes will benefit your school the most will depend on your unique needs.
Once you have determined your goals, the next step is to set benchmarks that will let you know whether you’re progressing. These benchmarks are called key performance indicators (KPIs) in marketing.
KPIs are quantifiable measurements related to the goals that you set over a given period. For example, if your goal is to drive more traffic to your school’s blog, the number of click-throughs you generate from sharing your blogs on your social channels might be a KPI.
Whether you want to build brand awareness, engage directly with prospects, or drive new leads, clearly defined KPIs and goals will ensure your business school’s social media strategy reflects what you want to achieve with your campaign. Setting KPIs and goals will also make it easier to analyze your campaigns, evaluate your progress, and identify the areas you need to improve.
Developing a Multi-Channel Social Media Strategy for Business Schools
Your school must be active on several different social media channels if you want to build a solid online reputation and reach as many prospective students as possible. The greater your online visibility, the easier for students to learn about your school and the more inquiries and applications you’ll receive.
Each channel occupies a slightly different niche in the social media world, and your business school can adapt its social strategy to best suit each platform.
As the fastest-growing social media channel, Instagram allows business schools to reach many prospects. Since IG is all about images, business schools can use their accounts to capture different aspects of their school visually.
Example: IE Business School posts high-quality Instagram photos that showcase its exciting events, thriving clubs, and beautiful campus.
One of the most popular features on IG is Instagram Stories, which are short photo or video clips that disappear after 24 hours. On Instagram, you can add different interactive elements to your stories, making them a particularly effective way to engage with students.
Example: Goodman School of Business showcases its events and achievements on this Instagram Story.
While Instagram may not drive web traffic to the same extent as other platforms or seem like the most natural fit for business schools, it’s still the world’s second-largest social network—and the one that the coming generation of your prospects are most likely to be active on. That should make it an essential part of your social media mix.
While Instagram’s growth has recently eclipsed Twitter’s, it’s still one of the most popular social media channels, so your school must put time and energy into maintaining a strong presence.
Business schools, in particular, can greatly benefit from Twitter since it’s the go-to platform for news and topical content. Many of your prospects may already use it to keep up with business trends, so by sharing your content and paying attention to trending business hashtags, you can offer them the relevant information they’re already looking for and position your school as a trusted online authority in your field.
Example: HEC Paris Business School frequently shares blog posts, many focusing on topical business trends. The school also retweets articles written by professors and alumni to offer Twitter users further information and insights and demonstrate its engagement with the platform’s broader business and academic communities.
As the world’s biggest social media site, Facebook is crucial for business schools to develop a strong presence. Simply put, you have the potential to reach a much larger audience on the platform than on any other social network. For example, Yale School of Management’s Facebook page has 85k followers, considerably higher than its 55k followers on LinkedIn, 50k followers on Twitter, and 27k followers on Instagram.
While Facebook’s organic reach has dwindled in recent years, certain strategies can still help your school find success. For instance, the platform’s live-streaming feature generates great engagement. Facebook Live videos produce 6x as many interactions as regular videos.
There are many ways for business schools to leverage Facebook Live as a recruitment tool. You can allow prospects to dialogue with professors and alumni through a Q&A format, offer virtual tours, and even allow viewers to take part in exciting events on your campus.
Example: The University of Alberta School of Business live streams lectures and other events, giving prospective students a chance to learn about the different kinds of opportunities the school offers.
Last but certainly not least is LinkedIn’s business-centric platform. LinkedIn users tend to be career-driven professionals, so it’s no secret to business schools that their target audience overlaps with LinkedIn’s user base.
Moreover, LinkedIn offers tailored features for higher education institutions, including a unique profile specifically for schools. These pages make communicating with prospects, alumni, current students, parents, employers, faculty, or donors easy.
Example: One particularly effective part of LinkedIn’s school pages is the alumni section, where prospective students can access the professional profiles of your institution’s graduates.
How much attention you devote to each of these sites will depend greatly on your target audience and your school’s unique selling points, but having some presence on each one is desirable. While much of your content can overlap on different social platforms, keep in mind the particular benefits of each to make the most of social media marketing for business schools.
Planning Your Business School’s Social Media Content
The content you post is the crux of your social media strategy—it will attract, engage, and convert prospects and define your business school’s image.
With some strategy and creativity, business schools can make their social media profiles into intellectual hubs where students can simultaneously gain business insight and learn more about your school. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Creating Topical Posts on Social Media
Since many millennials receive their news from social media, why not make your profile a place where prospects can learn about what’s happening in the business world? Doing so will simultaneously demonstrate your expertise in a prospect’s field of interest and attract quality student leads organically.
Example: Tepper School of Business frequently shares articles from respected business publications on social media. This particular piece is written by a Tepper professor himself, elevating the school further in readers’ eyes.
Suppose you can connect the informative content you share to your courses and programs. In that case, you’ll offer prospective students helpful resources and further pique their interest in studying at your school.
One easy way to do this is to create blog posts about topical content and business trends and share them on your social media channels.
Example: When a major business news story breaks, consider writing a blog post and sharing it on social media, as McGill Desautels did with this article on recent Boeing 737 software issues.
Highlight Student Success on Social
If business schools want to stand out on social media, it’s not enough to demonstrate your industry expertise. If your school wants to boost its online reputation, show how that expertise has impacted your students.
One effective way to do this is by leveraging alumni success stories. Think about the graduates you have who are charting new territory in the business world and highlight their accomplishments on your social accounts. By showcasing how your school has advanced the careers of its students, prospects will be more likely to trust you and see studying with you as an investment in their future.
Example: Schools can showcase their alumni online in many ways. Yale School of Management occasionally shares articles highlighting its alumni’s accomplishments, as shown in the first example. In the second example, the institution compiled numerous alumni stories in its online magazine and shared them on social media.
Showcase Campus Life and Networking Opportunities
While academic and career opportunities are usually the most important factors in a business student’s decision-making process, that doesn’t mean they don’t want an enriching social experience at your school. After all, the business world is all about networking.
Fortunately, it’s easy to capture campus life on social media. With various content formats, such as photos, videos, live streaming, and stories, your school can present different facets of the business school experience in different ways.
Example: Carlson School of Management uses Instagram Stories to alert students of upcoming networking opportunities and to share photos from those events.
Since each platform offers different posting formats and social networks constantly create new features, business schools will never run out of fresh, unique content ideas for their prospects.
Organize Your Social Media Content
Once your school has content in the bank, the next step is to determine when to post it.
When creating your social media marketing strategy, you should share content that is informative, educational, and entertaining alongside content designed to showcase your school. Many marketers follow the 80/20 principle, which states that 80% of your posts should be of interest to your personas, and 20% should be self-promotional.
Keep that principle in mind as you plan your social media posts. Make sure to combine lead-generating content, such as an event signup page or an admissions guide, with awareness and engagement-building content like insightful articles and fun videos.
A social media scheduling tool can be useful for maintaining a content balance and organizing your strategy efficiently.
Many marketing automation programs offer social media organizers, making it easier for schools to schedule and monitor social media posts.
Example: HubSpot’s social media scheduling platform helps ensure your posts go out at precisely the right time.
The more streamlined your social media efforts are, the more effective they will be and the more time your admissions staff can devote to other marketing activities.
Social Media Advertising for Business Schools
With 6,000 business schools worldwide searching for top-quality students, paid advertising is essential if your institution wants to gain a competitive edge.
Social advertising can be a huge part of this strategy. A recent Association of MBAs study found that business schools spend almost a third of their marketing budget advertising on the channel.
Although you can create ads for every social media channel, the two ad platforms your business school will likely find most beneficial in generating returns are Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
Find Business Students With Facebook Ads
As the second-largest advertising platform after Google and the biggest social media ad platform, Facebook Ads can greatly enhance your school’s online visibility.
Facebook Ads Manager enables you to customize your target ad audience based on characteristics such as:
- Location (city, community, countries, etc.)
- Demographics (age, gender, education, job, etc.)
- Interests (hobbies, passions, etc.)
- Behaviour (purchasing history, device usage, etc.)
- Connections (events attended, apps used, pages liked, etc.)
Example: If your school wants to promote one of its graduate degrees, you can target those with relevant work experience and academic history for your program.
Facebook also offers various advertising formats – from stories to videos to photos to direct messages to promoted events – to suit any ad campaign.
Example: This newsfeed Facebook Ad from EU Business School is simple, clear, and captivating.
Facebook ad campaigns can also be an opportunity to experiment with Instagram Ads, as both can be created and run through Facebook Ads Manager.
Create Successful LinkedIn Ads for Business Schools
Just as LinkedIn is one of the most effective social media platforms for reaching prospective business students, LinkedIn Ads have proven particularly successful for business schools.
With LinkedIn, you can set professionally focused parameters highly relevant to your institution. This allows you to pinpoint an audience with the academic background and work experience you’re looking for. The profession-focused fields are particularly detailed and include industry, company, job title, and group memberships.
Ad formats on LinkedIn include sponsored posts, text ads, and the ever-popular Sponsored InMail, which shares characteristics with instant messaging and email marketing. The platform is somewhat like Facebook Messenger, but the messages are set up like emails, with subject lines and the option to place linked CTAs within the body. However, unlike email, LinkedIn messages have a 400% higher open rate. Through LinkedIn Ads Manager, you can send InMails en masse without connecting with the users.
Example: As you can see, InMail comes in email format – using subject lines and CTAs – but the message comes from a real user’s profile, making it feel more personalized than a display ad.
Many business schools, particularly, have found InMail to be highly effective. For instance, a Jon M. Huntsman’s School of Business InMail campaign generated a 27.5 percent open rate and a 71 percent conversion rate. However, remember that this effectiveness comes with a cost – LinkedIn Ads are on the expensive side of social media advertising, so budget accordingly.
Monitor Your Business School’s Social Media Marketing Outcomes
Since developing an engaged social media audience takes time, it’s essential for business schools to pay close attention to their performance if they want to grow their presence continuously across different social networks.
You can see how your posts are performing and who is engaging with them on each social media channel.
Example: Facebook Insights offers useful reports to evaluate your progress on social media.
Schools can also glean insights from other reporting sources like CRM and marketing automation software, as well as Google Analytics, to measure their social media performance across channels. These reports also allow you to analyze how many leads your social strategy generates by showing how many people visit your website from social media and how many of those people ultimately submit inquiries and applications. Suppose paid advertising is part of your school’s social media strategy. In that case, you can also view detailed results data on your platform of choice to monitor and optimize your ad for maximum success.
The better you understand your social media campaigns, the easier it is to identify areas of improvement. With a robust monitoring strategy, your school will be better equipped to meet the goals it set out to achieve through social media.
FAQ To Consider
Do MBA programs look at social media?
Social advertising can be a huge part of this strategy. A recent Association of MBAs study found that business schools spend almost a third of their marketing budget advertising on the channel.
Although you can create ads for every social media channel, the two ad platforms your business school will likely find most beneficial in generating returns are Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.