4 min read

The Power of Social Listening

Social listening is the process of using technology to monitor your social media channels and identify trends in order to understand how your brand is perceived, identify key influencers, manage reputation and generate leads for your institution. Social listening analyses any sort of direct engagement with your brand, or it could be regarding specific topics related to your competitors and industry. This allows you to stay up to date regarding trends industry-wide.

The concept of social listening has become increasingly important for higher education institutions as more prospective students use online resources to research their options before making a decision on which school they will attend. In fact, nearly 90% of college-bound students turn to social media when doing their research about programs and campuses.

A purpose-built solution for social listening can provide your institution with a competitive advantage as it helps you effectively engage with prospective students, meet alumni and current students, optimize operations, reduce costs, and manage your institution’s brand reputation.

In this post we will look at how social listening can benefit education institutes to improve their service delivery by using data about what people are saying about them on social media platforms.

The diverse characteristics of social media give institutions the opportunity to listen in to their audience, measure engagement, and emphasize metrics that allow them to monitor their social activities.

Social media is a powerful tool for listening to your audience and measuring engagement. In order to do this, you will have to use the best tools available.

Amazing software solutions like Lucidya allow you to monitor conversations on social media platforms, identify key topics and sentiment, connect with influencers and customers, create reports and track progress over time.

Lucidya’s social analytics provide data about who’s talking about your brand or topic; what they are saying; how influential their followers are; which posts are most popular; which users are talking about your brand etc., so that you can make more informed decisions regarding strategy and tactics going forward

Social listening allows colleges and universities to listen deeply and understand the tone of conversations so they can better manage relationships with their student body.

It helps you:

Understand which students are talking about your institution in a positive or negative way, along with what they’re saying about it.
Gain insight into how to grow your audience by identifying influencers who may be able to help spread awareness of your brand or product.
Enhance communication with current students and alumni.

Social listening is an important part of any marketing strategy. By monitoring the conversations around your brand, you can gain valuable insight into what people are saying about you, and use that knowledge to improve your product or service.

However, social media listening isn’t just for companies—it’s also a great way for higher education institutions to engage with current students and alumni, prospective students, faculty and staff members, other stakeholders such as alumni or donors (students’ parents), the community surrounding your university (local businesses) and the media.

Social listening allows you to be proactive about responding to negative situations quickly; when something goes wrong on campus, it’s crucial that someone from the institution responds quickly so that no one feels left out in the cold without answers.

Conversations in Real Time

You can use Social listening to monitor the conversation around your brand in real time on any platform so you can react swiftly during a crisis. It also enables you to know when a crisis is happening, and be prepared to respond. Social listening helps you respond to negative comments, positive comments, or neutral comments in an informed way that reflects positively on your company.

Reach the right audience

You can easily see which messages reach the intended audience, how many shares they received, how they were received by different segments of the audience, and what impact they have over time by using social media metrics.

Using social media metrics makes it easier to understand your audience’s engagement with your communications because they give you a more accurate picture of how well each message is performing.

Competitive Advantage

Social listening enables educators to know when a conversation starts about their university and ensures that it alerts multiple people within the organization if negative feedback occurs.

Lucidya’s social listening product allows you to create an alerting system that notifies multiple people within the organization of important conversations happening on social media. Higher education institutions around the world can use this tool to respond quickly when someone says something negative about their school or college. By using this product at all levels within your organization you will be able to:

Know when a conversation has started about your university or college
Ensure that multiple people within the organization receive alerts if negative feedback occurs.

A complete competitive analysis might take time and effort from the brand but the benefits they reap in the end are second to none. Competitive analysis helps you assess your influence among your target audience, how your competitors are performing, and spot hidden opportunities that can bring in warm leads and generate revenue.

As a high-level metric for measuring engagement with prospective students on social media channels, share of voice is an effective way for educational institutions to track individual results as well as benchmark themselves against competitors.

Share of voice is a metric for measuring engagement with prospective students on social media channels. The share of voice is calculated by taking the sum of all individual posts about an educational institution over a given time period and dividing it by the sum of all mentions for all institutions in the same category during that same time period. This allows you to see how much attention a university is getting compared to its competitors.

For example: if people posted 100 mentions of two schools on Facebook over the past week (and they did not mention any other schools), then School A would have a 25% share of voice and School B would have a 50% share. This means that out of the 100 total Facebook posts mentioning any school during this timeframe, 25 mentioned School A and 50 mentioned School B. So, while people mentioned both schools equally often overall (50%), each school had slightly more than half as many mentions as the other did individually!

Conclusion

We hope this article has given you some insight into how social listening can benefit higher education institutions. Lucidya’s social listening solution has incredible potential for institutions looking to enhance communications with current students and alumni.