Social media, like most other social phenomena, operates on a cyclical basis. When you reach out to an audience on social media, you are engaging in the social cycle from the early stages of defining your social strategy to measuring the return on your efforts.
The cyclic component comes in after your results have been measured and you make the necessary adjustments to refine your strategy and begin the implementation, observation and testing process once again. Producing meaningful content is only part of the cycle. You must also find a way to influence potential followers and customers to not only read your content but share it with their online contacts.
Studies show that most prospects first contact a business through social media when they are between 66 and 90 percent of the way through the buying process. This means that your prospects are well into the cycle by the time they decide to reach out to you through social media, so it is essential to have content on your website and social platforms that communicates a compelling message.
This article will discuss the various stages of the cycle with the goal of helping you better understand how to use it in an educational context. From planning your social strategy to listening to your audience, networking with other influencers and closing the sale, each step of the social media cycle has its own significance. The most successful businesses continue to analyze the effectiveness of the social media cycle and realize that what works at one stage of development today may not work the same tomorrow. A truly successful cycle will yield obvious results, from a social audience that is eager to share your content to an increase in leads.
Listening to Your Audience
When it comes to the social cycle, nothing is more important than figuring out what your audience is looking for. A good way to set about this is to target certain keywords that have been proven important to your audience.
If prospective students frequently search for a program your institution is known for, consider tailoring your social strategy around the development of content in that area. Also take a moment to reflect on why people choose your institution in the first place. Academic programs, policies, location and notable faculty members are all possible areas of focus for the content you will be distributing through social media.
The best source of information on what prospects are looking for on social media is simply to ask. Companies that use social media to develop an interactive relationship with their followers gain valuable insight from connections most likely to convert to leads are eager to provide.
As of 2015, internet marketing makes up one quarter of the advertising market, and educational institutions have an audience that is more primed to respond to internet marketing than any other. Social media is no longer an option when it comes to creating a strong marketing campaign, and taking the time to listen to what your audience has to say before you begin will help you hone your social strategy and jump into the cycle of social media at a more developed stage.
Creating a Strategy
Choosing which social media platforms to focus on is essential to developing an effective social media strategy. It is important to remember that the social media cycle is different on different platforms and that your institution may have very different social needs from others.
The biggest mistake you can make in the strategizing stage of the social cycle is launching a social media campaign on numerous platforms without carefully analyzing which ones would actually benefit your institution. In general, it is best to select three social media platforms that are highly relevant to your audience.
One Survey found:
67 percent of marketers planned to participate more on YouTube
64 percent planned to increase their LinkedIn usage
68 percent planned to blog more
YouTube can be a highly effective medium for educational institutions since it allows you to share different types of videos such as:
Current staff and faculty interviews
Student perspectives
A glimpse into life at the institution
Campus events
FAQ’s
And other pertinent information
People love to share videos across other social media platforms, so YouTube is a great way to disseminate your content to a larger audience.
LinkedIn is another powerful platform for educational institutions and organizations. Because professionals use LinkedIn to network with colleagues as well as coworkers within the same industry, higher education institutions can benefit from having a strong presence on LinkedIn that allows interested applicants to ask questions and get a more in-depth view of the school’s history.
Facebook is an obvious choice when it comes to connecting with a large audience. Facebook has a specific page setup for educational institutions that make it easy to list relevant information, upload pictures and promote posts to those within a specific area or who have interests relevant to your institution.
Twitter offers bite-sized content sharing and is ideal for institutions that want to keep followers up-to-date on events and crucial information as it unfolds.
Which social media platform you choose is an important part of the strategizing stage of your social media cycle, but it is far from the only one. You should also decide early how much you are willing to spend on your social media campaign and have a plan to reassess once the metrics reveal your successes and losses.
It is also important to incorporate a content schedule into your overall strategy. Content and how you present it is what garners attention on social media, but how frequently you post has a significant effect on who sees it and when.
Influencing Your Peers and Followers
If drawing attention to your institution and website is the goal of social media, influence is the method. Institutions with social media influence create content that is distributed by the competition as well as prospects. 80 percent of marketers report that social media has driven traffic to their website and increased awareness of their brand, but these successes happen through a careful balance between original content creation and curated content.
Creating original content is the first step to becoming an influencer in the social media cycle. Whether you choose to write a series of informative blog posts, create video tutorials or produce insightful infographics that simplify complex concepts in a way that is quick and easy to understand, your content should always be used as a platform to express the expertise of your institution. For this reason, it is best to create original content that is both highly relevant to your niche and highly sought after by your readers. Search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated with the ability to tell the difference between content that is truly authoritative and rich in organic keywords and content that is unoriginal or hastily assembled.
Creating engaging, meaningful content is the easy part of the influencing stage. No matter how relevant or clever your latest blog post may be, the amount of people who see it depends largely on your relationships with other content producers in your niche.
This is where the influencing stage blends heavily with networking and content curation. Content curation is the practice of sifting through competitor blogs and social media feeds to find content that you can share with your followers. While it may seem counterintuitive to give more attention to your competitors, sharing is how social media accounts build their reputations.
Getting and sustaining attention on social media requires a steady stream of content, which is more than most institutions can produce on their own. By sharing high-quality content that your audience will find useful, you can use hashtags, SEO and viral posts to promote your institution. In return, some of those content producers may share your original content, continuing the social media cycle.
One important thing to remember when getting started with a content curation strategy is to always vet the content you share properly. Resist the urge to simply share an article with a title that looks good without checking for grammar, tone and overall quality. The goal is to share content that is similar to what you would produce, as your audience will associate your brand with everything you share. Shared content that is poorly written, crude and of an overall low quality reflects as strongly on your brand as if you had created it yourself.
Networking with Other Influencers
The best way to build your reputation on social media is to network with other influencers. LinkedIn is by far the most well-known networking platform, but there are others that can help you build relationships with these key social media players.
First, you have to know who they are. Applications like Klout rank social media users by aggregating data from their profiles across platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn ad Twitter, to create a score denoting their level of influence. On a scale from 1 to 100, Klout will tell you who the biggest social media influencers are in your niche.
Another useful application is HootSuite, which not only lets you schedule your social media posts but helps you identify the most prolific social media users in your niche by such statistics as followers and posts. By identifying users who post and share often, you can not only network with their social media accounts but with their followers and contacts as well. The benefit of using these applications is that you do not have to search through the millions of social media users in your field to find the accounts that are active and thriving.
Another way to make the networking process easier is to build lists. Twitter has a built-in list function that makes it easy to organize followers into specific lists, from prospects to other influencers within a given area. This makes it easier to target content towards specific groups and can help declutter your feed. Hootsuite and similar applications are also useful for the organizational process. Once you know who you want to network with, the best way is to do a little research before you dive in and start a conversation. It is important to let potential networking contacts know why your institution is relevant to them and to always offer the same insights you hope to gain from them.
Selling Your Product
The goals of social media marketing may be different in the educational field, but the underlying principles are largely the same. Your institution has a product to sell and social media provides an affordable and powerful platform to generate leads.
Whether you are looking to drive prospects to your website to review admissions information or to call your institution directly, social media can help you achieve all your sales goals.
While social media is affordable compared to most traditional forms of marketing, it is a mistake to assume that it is free. Even though there is no charge for setting up a profile on most major social media platforms, the sales stage of the social cycle still requires someone to manage your social media accounts, create content and manage your customer interactions. This can be costly in time if not in money.
A Nielsen report found that American users spend 23 percent of their time online using social media. Because consumers devote so much time to social media platforms, businesses can reap the benefits of distributing messages to them on a platform that the user is likely to remain on for a significant amount of time.
Rather than advertisements, which are easily ignored or blocked and flash quickly before distracted users, social media provides your institution the opportunity to reach out in a direct conversation with your prospects. Because you are providing a useful service through the production of high-quality content and the curation of other high-quality content, your prospects are far more likely to be responsive to your message than they would be through traditional marketing methods.
Use Your Competitors’ Social Media
Utilizing your competitors’ social media presence to your advantage goes beyond curating content and hoping for likes and shares. Identify competitors whose social media strategies have yielded the results you would like to see for your institution and dissect what they did.
What worked for them may not always work for you, but if you are within the same niche and seeking many of the same prospects, employing their strategies is a good way to hone your strategy and reduce the trial-and-error process. There are many ways you can accomplish this, but the best way to start is to simply analyze their behavior on social media. By sitting back and watching the conversation unfold, you will gain powerful insights into the ways they interact with prospects, network with other institutions, the type of content they share, and how they handle problems that arise.
Once you have a general feel for the competition’s tone and overall social media strategy on each platform that interests you, take a look at who is following them. Try to determine whether these are the same people who are likely to be interested in your institution, and if not, consider moving on to a different influencer.
If so, ask yourself what about your competitor’s social media profile drew their attention. Of equal importance is the question of what kinds of things your competitor could be doing to draw even more interest and interaction. In the same way, you should try to analyze which of your competitor’s posts are getting the most interactions. Comments, likes, shares and retweets are the vehicle by which a piece of content goes viral, and the more you emulate those pieces, the more likely it is that your own content will go viral.
Your competitors’ content can yield crucial insights and time-saving content ideas. While you want to ensure that the content you produce is original, social media tends to operate on trends. If your top competitors are all blogging about a topic, there is a very good chance that your readers want to hear about it, too.
The key to creating original content, while learning from the competition, is to add a perspective to each piece that only your institution could provide. If your blog or video is created with enough of a unique tone that the piece feels fresh, no matter how many times the subject matter has been discussed elsewhere, you are one step closer to viral success.
Measure Your Success
Analytics are one of the most crucial stages of the social media cycle. Without the proper tools of measurement, you may never know if your social media campaigns are successful or not. Even the most well-managed campaign can fail to reach the right target audience if one or two aspects of its engineering are off.
Likewise, basic strategies that you launch on an experimental basis can prove to be some of the most powerful weapons in your social media marketing arsenal. There are virtually unlimited ways of measuring your success on social media, from tried-and-true methods of analysis to complex algorithms and apps designed specifically for the purpose. Fortunately, the methods that are the most successful tend to be the simplest and relatively affordable as well.
According to a Demand Metric and Netbase survey, 60 percent of respondents used social media analytics for campaign tracking. Campaign tracking is essential for understanding how and why your social media campaigns are or are not working. This enables you to adjust your marketing strategy in the future rather than continuing to spend limited advertising dollars on strategies that simply do not provide a solid ROI.
An impressive 48 percent of the survey respondents reported using social media analytics for brand analysis, which refers to the concept of determining how prospects perceive your brand. In an educational context, this might refer to how potential students or donors view the strengths and weaknesses of your institution, which programs you are most well-known for, and the overall impression of your school.
Another 36 percent reported using analytics to improve overall customer relations by reaching out to new customers to develop a positive relationship and even managing disputes or problems that come up in an individualized way.
A/B testing is by far one of the simplest yet often misunderstood methods of measuring success on social media. The principle itself is straightforward and involves comparing two viable social media strategies with real world testing.
A common example of this analytic tool is comparing two styles of headlines for the same article. This can be accomplished by using headline A on one social media platform and headline B on another. Next time, try posting an article with the headline A style on the other platform and do the same with the headline B style. Observe which style of headline garners the most attention on each platform. The smallest differences in how prospects interact with different phrasing or any other aspect of social media presentation can make it possible to increase your audience with only minor tweaks to your content.
Google Analytics is another highly effective tool for analyzing the effectiveness of your social media efforts. This free tool offers remarkably in-depth analysis of your social media audience. Google Analytics will tell you which platforms you have a strong presence on as well as deliver crucial information about your target audience.
Getting Assistance for Your Institution
The social media cycle is a complex thing to manage. From creating a solid social media strategy and growing an audience to producing and sharing quality content on a regular basis to keep that audience satisfied, the various steps within the social media cycle can seem overwhelming or difficult to manage. Working with a social media management company like Six Degrees Digital Media offers you a road map to success across all your chosen social media platforms.
Contact Six Degrees Digital Media today at (520) 572-2390 or fill out our online contact form for a free, zero-pressure consultation and start off the social cycle on the right foot today.
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