The best way to ensure success on social media is to plan for what success looks like.
Start by identifying clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your institution’s growth and enrollment objectives. These goals and KPIs give your efforts the direction you need to create content that engages your target audiences. By aligning these goals with your institution’s growth objectives, you will be able to better focus your efforts on actions that directly drive the outcomes you hope to see.
An audit of your social media channels is a smart place to start so you have a baseline for your current performance, content strengths, and weaknesses.
When setting goals, be sure to differentiate between organic and paid media, and who your target audiences are. For paid media, your audience will be prospects (there are lots of different age ranges!) but for organic posting, most of your audience will be internal (current students, staff, etc.).
This is an important distinction when it comes to setting achievable goals. For example, while you want prospects who you are targeting via paid media to visit your website, this isn’t a critical metric for current students. For them, engagement and reach are more important.
The most common goals for institutions of higher learning include raising brand awareness (amongst prospects and community members), recruiting new students, cultivating engagement (amongst current students), and increasing followers (amongst current students).
As you’ve heard before, good goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Once you’ve established overall goals, determine which channels you will be using to reach these goals. If you’re just getting started, don’t be overwhelmed by the number of social media options out there. Just focus on the most important channels you need to achieve your goals and remember it’s better to have one awesome social media channel than several mediocre ones. If you like to be told what to do, focus on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube first. They’re still the most impactful and affordable channels for marketers.
Because social media channels all have different strengths and weaknesses, you may have different goals for different channels. If you don’t know what different channels are good for, you need to. For example, it’s important to know that YouTube isn’t great for generating web traffic, but it’s the bomb when it comes to building awareness. Knowing your channels will make sure the goals you set for them are actually achievable.
For the same reason that channels are different, you should expect the content you use to achieve these goals on each channel to be different as well.
In the end, remember that there are things social media can and can’t do. If your goals aren’t aligned with what various channels can actually do, you are setting yourself up for failure. And that is exactly NOT what we’re trying to do.
Instead, set your goals accordingly and success is sure to follow!
