August 2011 – Page 2 – Andy writes!

At the university where I work, we’ve been involved in the social media channels of Facebook and Twitter since 2007. But it wasn’t until this past weekend, as freshmen were moving into their rooms and Greek housing, that the level of engagement with our audiences on social media started to reach a point that I would consider critical mass in the sociodynamic sense.

OK, that may be a bit hyperbolic. Maybe “critical mass” is the wrong term. But the levels and quality of social media activity between our university and our audiences seems to be increasing.

Maybe it’s just that normal activity has resumed on social networks following a summer lull. But when I look at the data, I see indicators of increased engagement.

Facebook interactions and activity has been on the rise in terms of daily, weekly and monthly active users, likes and interactions (comments).

Twitter activity has also been on the uptick, with significant growth over the past three months (see chart below) and more interaction with followers, including retweets.

MissouriSandT Twitter Counter

I’m not sure what this means — yet. It could be that students, alumni and other target audiences are becoming more comfortable with the main social media tools as a means for interacting with colleges and universities. This rise in acceptance and activity would be consistent with the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and others. (See Pew’s findings on social networking sites and our lives.)

It could also mean that the steady, persistent use of social media by campuses is starting to pay off. This would lend credibility to the argument that social media is not a quick fix, and that colleges and universities should not expect instant results from their efforts. This also suggests that consistent and persistent engagement in social media by an organization — university, business, non-profit, individual — will yield dividends over the long haul.

Whatever it means, it’s an exciting time to be involved in social media marketing/communication in higher ed.

As a new school year begins, what are you seeing with your social media efforts?

A recent post by Karine Joly, titled Why #highered is NOT there yet with social media marketing, took a skeptical but realistic look at some reported results about the state of social media in higher ed.

Delving into the UMass Dartmouth study on social media adoption in higher education — which shows what most of us assumed anyway: practically every college and university everywhere is using social media in some form — Karine compares some of those findings with the results of a couple of other studies on social media in higher ed. Her analysis suggests that all may not be so hunky dory in our social media world.

Just because survey respondents report that their social media efforts are successful doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Yes, the UMass Dartmouth study reports, “respondents have consistently raved about their [social media] experience, especially Facebook (95% success) and YouTube (92%).” But as the original .eduGuru Kyle James points out in his summary of the study, measurement is sorely lacking. “The only surprising negative,” Kyle wrote, “was that only 68% are listening to what is being said about them online by monitoring the internet for news, conversations or buzz about their institutions.”

How can you declare victory in the social media sphere when you aren’t paying attention to what is being said about your institution there? That is a problem.

KPIs to the rescue

All of this data leads Karine to conclude that there is “a real need to go beyond the ‘social media checklist’ tactic and adopt a more strategic and measurable approach in higher education.” I agree. I suspect many of you do, too, judging from the comments on Karine’s blog post. I know Michelle Sargent does. She nails it with her response to Karine’s post: “The focus needs to be on how this compares with business analytics and KPIs. We need to always be exploring and investigating previous business performance to understand what it is we want to achieve through future strategies.”

KPIs, or “key performance indicators,” are sorely lacking in our business. But we could learn from other sectors and apply their social media KPIs to our efforts.

According to another recent study (there sure are a lot of people studying social media these days), marketers in the tech, media/entertainment, and utilities and banking sectors have their favorite KPIs, many of which would be easy to follow in higher ed. The include some relatively easy KPIs, such as impressions and reach, social media “likes,” and microblogging (Twitter) followers, as well as more challenging or expensive to measure indicators, such as customer satisfaction scores and brand sentiment. Here’s a chart of most used KPIs from those sectors.

These KPIs are not necessarily a panacea, but perhaps this could be a place to start.

P.S. – Thanks to @azurecollier for pointing me to the eMarketer study about KPIs.
What KPIs do you use to measure your social media measurement and engagement?