Higher Ed Marketing Memos: Starting Social Media from Scratch by Ellen Brummel

New school name? Time to introduce ourselves on Social Media!

Just over a year ago, the business school where I work had no social media presence of its own. We contributed the occasional post to the Monash University’s institutional social media accounts, but hadn’t launched our own yet.

When we changed our name to Monash Business School, over a year ago, it was time to change our social media status – literally.

Starting from scratch, we launched the social media accounts of Monash Business School with the aim of introducing it to the world and to showcase its activities.

When I took the professional certificate course on social media marketing for higher ed, I learned all about setting up channels, determining goals and messages, creating a content calendar, but also tracking and managing performance. This was a good foundation from which to start.

We started out with a Facebook account (aimed at prospective students, primarily in the undergraduate space), a Twitter account (targeting professionals and media) and a LinkedIn account (also targeting the professional market).

Soon, it was decided we’d add an Instagram account to the mix (aimed at an undergraduate market). Not long after, a LinkedIn University page followed (which – given the developments at LinkedIn in this space – is on hold for now).

Starting from scratch is NOT easy

However, setting up this many different channels, we came across a few challenges and questions:

• How to differentiate between them?
• What should our goals be for each account?
• How to make sure we have the content required to keep these channels interesting and fresh?
• Where to find the time to do this on top of my other duties?

The latter will probably never fully be resolved (there is always more to do!), but we tackled most of the other points.

I’ve also learned that accounts don’t only grow, they evolve.

While we started with a certain idea in mind for some, reality caught up with our plan. What was happening on our pages led us to rethink our strategy.

For example, our Facebook page ended up attracting an older audience than we initially anticipated. In addition, a reasonably large portion of our followers turned out to be current students. So, we changed our approach from targeting prospective undergraduates to current students and prospective graduate students. We also worked more on building a community and on providing additional information for our students – activities on campus, events, student societies, graduate courses, some content marketing, as well as sharing articles around hot topics for students, such as skills employers are looking for.

Now that we have started working with promoted posts on Facebook and LinkedIn, we are seeing growth in our follower base – slowly but surely. On LinkedIn we have seen more than 10% of growth in followers each month and an increase in user engagement on some of our content marketing pieces. This is a very pleasing result.

We didn’t anticipate something else when we started: how challenging it can be to respond to comments and questions in a timely manner.

While some queries are easily resolved by members of our team, we are working to improve our turnaround times on comments on our content. Fortunately, our academics – who contributed to these articles – have always been happy to engage, another excellent outcome. Yet, the immediacy of social media can sometimes clash with the more reflective pace of the academic environment.

The magic power of social media

While we’re always looking for ways to improve, it’s quite pleasing to see how far we’ve come already.

What has been the most exciting thing for us in this 1-year journey in the social media world?

Seeing an improved awareness of our social media activities, both within and outside of the School. We’re now approached by researchers looking to share their stories and work, because they recognise the need for interaction and are keen to engage in the conversation.

We’ll continue to work on coming up with new ideas, creating awareness within our organisation to improve our participation levels, as well as our external engagement to continue to build the profile of Monash Business School.

While we’ve made a lot of progress, we still face a big challenge – as you probably do too – created by the constant changing field of online and social communication/marketing!

• What’s new out there?
• Should we be participating?
• What do we have to say?

That’s one of the things that keeps our job exciting, right?

In this context, what better way to tackle this challenge than to embrace Monash University motto: ancora imparo (I am still learning)?

Meet the Author: Ellen Brummel

Ellen Brummel is the Communications Specialist at Monash Business School in Melbourne, Australia. She is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program on social media marketing for higher education.