Higher ed social media talks with Jessica Stutt, Integrated Marketing Manager – University of New Brunswick

Jessica Stutt, Integrated Marketing Manager at the University of New Brunswick, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2019-2020 Higher Ed Social Media Conference.

In this 4-question interview, Jessica tells us about higher ed social media in 2020, a favorite tool, 3 higher ed social media campaigns as well as strategy and measurement.

1) Where do you think higher ed social media is heading in 2020?

I think the biggest challenge for anyone overseeing social media efforts is how quickly the landscape evolves. Privacy considerations are ever-changing and platforms are responding slowly but surely.
We have a new generation coming into our institutions who have unique perspectives and preferences. Specifically, I think we are going to have to continue to focus paid social dollars in strategic areas to drive results we were used to getting organically. And I think that we need to continue to make our platforms relevant to our target audiences so that they want to opt-in to see all of our amazing content!

2) What’s your favorite new tool for your social media work?

I am all about the measurement tools so my answer is Facebook Analytics. While it is not necessarily brand new, I think a lot of people still aren’t using it. Many of us contribute to and/or manage multiple Facebook pages and this is an amazing tool for bringing those pages all together. It’s a one-stop shop for your Facebook measurement needs and includes important Business Manager tools such as your ad accounts and pixel. (It’s also going to be covered in my presentation!)

3) What higher ed social media campaigns have recently caught your attention?

Shout out to my school – UNB’s digital team has just launched a new campaign called #weareunb, featuring stories of the people at our institution – including students, faculty, and staff. It’s helping to strengthen our community and I love the human aspect of it. It’s just getting started so I encourage you to follow along at our DiscoverUNB insta! Here’s an example. Go explore others!

University of Manitoba rebrand: This caught my eye as someone who has been through a rebrand in recent memory. It’s always interesting to see how higher ed institutions roll out their new look and feel. I liked how University of Manitoba provided great background on their new visual identity and have leveraged different platforms (including their student union’s accounts) to share this information. See it here as an Instagram Story highlight and a really informative landing page.

Tufts #Tufts2019 story – I started following Tufts last year after someone gave them a shout out leading up to the HESM conference. They do a lot of great things but I loved this insta story highlight around commencement. Particularly I liked how they start it with some specific messaging that they want to convey before featuring more organic content from the commencement ceremonies. The way they quantify the seniors’ shared experiences was really cool!

4) What are your strategic social media goals and how do you measure against these goals?

A key focus continues to be on how we can best measure our paid efforts to ensure we’re generating results. We’ve broken more of our paid advertising into funnel stages, allocating specific spends to generating awareness (focusing on impression delivery, video views, etc.), driving consideration (re-targeting those who engage with awareness messaging to send them to our website) and finally doing our best to measure conversions (e.g. event registrations, inquiry form completions, donations, etc.). To do this we’re leveraging what’s available to us in-platform as well as ensuring we’re properly link tagging so that we can measure via Google Analytics. Sometimes the hardest part is setting aside the time during and afterwards to properly measure performance. But, I’m definitely walking the walk of social media analytics and not just talking the talk in the course I teach on the topic for Higher Ed Experts.