As you might have heard last week, DIY social listening just got a lot harder, as Twitter announced they’re increasing costs for API access. Drastically. Which will inevitably put a lot of folks in a tricky spot as free monitoring apps disappear and options narrow.
There are some great premium social monitoring apps out there, Brandwatch is without doubt the Cadillac (or Rolls Royce if you’re English like me). It’s where our expert analysts build queries, dashboards, and create meaningful insights for our marketing and communications clients.
But can you realistically find meaning in the conversations your students, alumni, donors, and fans have about you simply by investing in a platform? Sure. If you have access to analysts who know how to write detailed queries, clean the data, and have the capacity to analyze it all to make it meaningful.
As a former Executive Director of Marketing and Communications at a private college with a small and brilliant team, I recall thinking that it was possible. Merrily procuring a well-known platform with some lofty goals, I quickly learned that the support and superficial insights were frankly unusable as a senior leader. Picture a marketing and comms team frustrated at regular mentions of church groups with similar acronyms, and bots (lots of bots) clogging up our data.
Stepping back, I realized my costly mistake. If I wanted to show that the brand was performing beyond expectations to my president and board, I realistically needed to properly invest. Only experts could help me achieve that—not the flashy software.
So as you’re considering whether to invest in new monitoring software with its promise of social listening insights, or fighting on with DIY listening, take a moment. Do you have clarity on the queries you’ll write, the insights you’ll need, and how you’ll translate it for that all important presidential report?
Alastair Hayes
Marketing Director
Fundamentals of Social Listening
One of our core areas of expertise is brand and reputation management. As we shared at the 2023 CUPRAP conference, social listening can help your campus measure brand awareness, support long-term goals, and make data-informed decisions. As a starting point, you need a good understanding of the differences betweensocial media monitoring and social listening. If you missed my presentation with the University of Arkansas Fort-Smith’s Rachel Putman, read on for more ways social listening can support your brand health on campus.
Katlin Swisher
Senior Strategist
Using Social Listening to Support Brand Health
Define your reputation. Social listening helps you identify what your audiences are really saying online and how the conversation shapes your campus’s brand narrative.
Align social media metrics and measurement with goals. Successful social media strategy is rooted in clearly articulated goals that reflect a campus’s values and priorities. Putting “social media” in front of the word “goal” doesn’t make it different or special; it simply denotes the medium used to achieve the goal.
“Getting more followers” or “going viral” isn’t why campuses invest in social media. They invest because it’s 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. That’s why we have to move beyond vanity metrics like followers and engagement.
Move Beyond Vanity Metrics: Metrics that Matter
These key metrics efficiently and effectively measure your brand awareness.
Conversation is the number of times your campus is mentioned in online conversation. It indicates how much they’re talking as well as how much your various campus accounts publish content. Increasing conversation volume over time reflects an increase in word-of-mouth about your brand.
Once you know the conversation volume for your campus, you can segment it to see who is talking about you, what they’re talking about, and where they’re talking. This helps you understand the conversation about your campus brand to create messaging that resonates with your audiences.
June 2021–May 2022 Median Higher Ed Benchmark: 24,117 (This number varies depending on campus type, enrollment, athletics, etc.)
Earned conversation: The portion of the online conversation that doesn’t come from campus accounts (i.e., students, alumni, prospects, family members, journalists, fans). This reflects who is talking about your campus.
It is important to understand your total online conversation generated by owned conversation versus that driven by earned conversation. Knowing the typical breakdown for your campus can inform goal setting and content strategy.
Owned conversation: Generated by accounts affiliated with a campus such as the campus’s official social media accounts, athletics department and teams, or academic department pages. Leaving it out of your social media reporting ignores the contribution of word-of-mouth to your brand.
Track earned conversation as a percentage of total volume and as a total number. As your brand awareness improves, your earned conversation should increase. You may also want to understand how much of your earned conversation is related to athletics to understand its impact on your brand.
Complex account segments support robust understanding of brand conversation and audience perceptions and help inform recommendations.
June 2021–May 2022 Benchmark: 28% owned vs. 72% earned.
When we segment our campus partners’ conversation, we break owned conversation down even further to compare core conversation (that published by central marcomm teams) vs. institutional owned (that published by all the other university-affiliated offices, departments, programs, etc.). While not managed by the partnership teams, that content is still reflective of the campus brand.
Sentiment: A barometer of how a community feels about your campus. Understanding the nuances associated with positive, negative, and neutral conversation is critical for campuses to better plan, prepare, and respond to all kinds of situations and conversation topics, or to anticipate when a crisis may be on the horizon.
June 2021–May 2022 Benchmark:70% neutral, 5% negative, 23% positive
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