A great social media strategy always starts with audience data, right?
If you work in social media, you know it’s called social for a reason: it’s about the people. Not all the people, but the people you want to reach, engage and move to action. And, this often means teens and young adults in higher education (yes, we target other demographics, but this is a big one!)
I’ve been busy for the past few days sharing some great insights from the 2018 RNL E-Expectations Study after getting an exclusive first look at this great study on what prospective students expect when it comes to digital communications from colleges.
I will share the 4th and last part of my blog series about it tomorrow, a part focusing on social media.
It’s been a great year for research on social media usage data with no fewer than 3 different surveys on the topic in the past few months:
- 2018 RNL E-Expectations Study (March & April 2018)
- 2018 Encoura Eduventures Student Sentiment Survey (April 2018)
- Pew Research Center’s Social Media & Technology (April 2018)
As I was working on the graphs for my 2018 E-Expectations series, I created a few more charts to present some of the data from the 2 other surveys I got access to (thanks Eduventures for sharing data that wasn’t published yet!)
Top social media channels with data from 3 different sources
The Pew Research Center’s survey was done by phone with teens aged 13 through 17.
The Eduventures survey was administrated online and targeted high school seniors and juniors.
The RNL E-Expectations survey was administrated online and targeted high school seniors and juniors as well.
Top Social media channels for college search from 2 different sources
In the Eduventures survey, high school students who said they use a specific social media channel were then asked how often they used or will use it in their college search.
The following chart is what you get by compiling all their answers excluding the “never” option.
This second chart showcases the results only for students who indicated they use or will use a specific channel at least once a month as part of their college search – which, in my opinion, is a bit more telling by filtering out the “once in a blue moon” selections.
In the RNL E-Expectations survey, survey respondents were asked to select the best social media channels for their college search, so this is slightly different in nature from the data above.
Looking for a conference focusing 100% on higher ed social media?
The Higher Ed Social Media Conference takes place every year online the Wednesday after Thanksgiving.
It’s a great online conference to help teams celebrate the best practices in higher ed social media before the Holidays – and get inspired for the new year.
The call for proposals for the upcoming edition is now open.