Social media content marketing strategy for Higher Education

Hello, my name is Garcia. I'm from Portugal from Polytechnic Institute to regional to Castel. And I'm here at where’s world higher education ranking summit 2022 to present social media content marketing strategies for higher education. This is the agenda for my presentation, I will start to give a brief introduction of the concepts related to social media, content marketing, and all the strategies that are related to this approach. Then, I will give also an overview of some consumer trends in 2022. After that, I will show some strategies that are used by using these institutions and colleges all over the world, in the social media marketing approach, and I will also present some proper uses of these strategies in higher education. Finally, I will give some final considerations about my presentation, and the strategies that universities can do in the field of social media marketing.

I will start to present the concept of content marketing as the strategy of creating content for social media networks, which aims to the publication and sharing of such content to create a brand reputation and improve its visibility as well as gain more engagement with the followers, customers, students, candidates, anyone who follows our website, or social media profiles, the basic principles of these strategies is to have more proximity is to talk, entertain, and evolve all the followers of the social media profiles. And with this strategy, we intend to equate this kind of engagement with all the followers. In this case of universities, with all the students and future students of the colleges or the higher education institutions.

The advancements in the strategy of social media content marketing, it's to improve the relationship with followers with customers with students to increase engagement, engagement rates with followers, to increase the visibility of the brand company on or in this case, the colleges, the universities, or the higher education institutes. Also, we can create fan followers of the brands, because these kinds of searches use valuable content.

So people who follow these brands, these social media profiles, are also beginning to be a fan of the brand because of the type of content that they like to interact to engage to share with their friends and colleagues. Also, an advantage of the social media content marketing strategy is to the promotion of services with relevant content is not just an advert, it's not just a post with an ad. It's content that can promote the brand, but in a way that people like to interact to share with their friends. And finally, it allows to increase sales and increase the conversion rates that can be placed in these kinds of posts.

The goal of a company's brand presence on social media networks is more than getting a greater number of reactions or shares. Nowadays, in social media brands want to create a lasting and constant relationship with their followers or customers. For this, the type of language and content they should publish should be closer to the target audience. Does this mean that the kind of language the kinds of posts that these brands want to share with their followers must be closer to the target and must be analysed. What is the target of the brand? What is the buyer persona of these companies of these universities to understand what kind of posts and what kind of content the universities should post on the social media?

In this content marketing strategy, we have nine rules to keep in mind before starting to create content for social media.

1) know the audience
The first one, as I said before, is to know the audience it is necessary to understand who the followers of the profile are, to know what kind of content should be created. Because there is no target that is the same in different social media. For example, the targets of Facebook, it's a little bit different from Twitter or from Instagram, Tik Tok, or any other social media that we have nowadays.

2) speak the same language
The second rule is to speak the same language, the way you communicate is important because it creates the positioning of the company brand.

3) Understand the audience
The third rule is to understand the audience before publishing any type of content, it is necessary to understand whether the content is relevant to the audience. And it's consistent with the brand positioning. Does the audience like this type of content? Does it create interaction? Is it relevant? These are different questions that we should make before developing the content and posting it on social media. Because if there is not any kind of interaction with this post, there is no relevance to this post. It's not necessary to do a post that will not give value to the audience.

4) Open Communication
Open communication, asking questions to the public answering questions they asked in the comments. Encouraging true reaction to comments. Not deleting negative comments helps to understand that the brand has frank and open communication. And open communication is very important nowadays. Because there are a lot of brands communicating on social media, and the customer, the customers, the customers, consumers. And also the followers of the brands have a lot of power on social media because they can comment can share. They can say anything about a brand nowadays on social media, on their websites, in all the places that worldwide have to share opinions and content.

5) Appropriate content
The fifth rule is to create appropriate content, images and text views in the content must be appropriate to the social network in which they are published, and you should understand that the way we post on Facebook is very different from the way we post on Instagram, on Twitter and YouTube. So it's important to understand what kind of formats are used in this social media to have a better reach and higher reach with all the followers. Images must be appealing and have a size that allows for correct viewing on all devices. And finally, in this fifth row, texts should be considered written more informally. Users have that expectation on social media networks.

6) Different Formats
The sixth rule is the use of video different forms of images, emoticons, and all kinds of resources that help diversify the content to capture the attention of different audiences and react differently. Not all people react the same way. As in Twitter as Instagram. Many people like to see videos for instance, on Facebook, but others just like to see images, and text, and not are related to videos on Facebook.

7) Objectives
The seventh rule is the objectives or content should be posted with concrete objectives like views, reactions, and shares, and this will allow you to understand which content is more successful and which is not relevant to the audience. It is important to identify, to define the KPIs that are involved with these strategies. So analyzing this kind of metric, we can understand if the content is good and if it's satisfying the customers’ needs and the follower’s needs. So it is very important to define goals defined objectives for each content that is posted on social media.

8) Identity
The eighth rule is that either Identity language or these old text content identities should be used that helps to maintain a relationship with the followers. Forwards expectations from the social network are based very much on the identity of the published content, content different from what is expected leads to loss of engagement and followers. People who follow a brand people who follow a university, college Higher Education Institute are expecting some kind of content. That's why they started to follow these profiles. If the contents they are used to see it's not the same they see nowadays, people react less and in the meantime can lead to a loss of engagement and followers.

9) Monitoring
And finally, the ninth rule is to militarize and measure all the performance of each published spouse which will allow you to understand the engagement rates of each published content, as it will help you understand the social media user’s habits of the brand's followers understand what are the most appropriate these times to post the content, the number of content sponsors per day. And finally, the type of content preferred by the audience.

These are the nine rules that we have to keep in mind before starting to publish on social media because it's important to have a strategy to think what are the goals that we have for these posts and identify what are the best techniques and formats to post in each social media that we have in the world wide web.

Now I will speak about the trends of the consumers, and what kind of consumers we have in 2022. The evolution and innovation and the technological innovation have led to the evolution of consumers’ expectations, the consumer expectations are a little bit different from some years ago, nowadays, we talk about the assess generation, millennials and Generation Z value much more the access to the experience, rather than owning ownership. These kinds of people, people from these generations, these young people prefer to rent a house to rent a car, to have a taxi, if you were to listen to a song on Spotify, watch a TV series, a movie on Netflix, they don't have the needs to own the things, they don't need to have a house on a car, as we did 23 years ago, this generation people, these people, the people from this generation, prefer to rent prefer to have the experience now, then, to wait one month, one year, 10 years to have that kind of experience. They have to, they want to experience it now. So they prefer to subscribe to a service subscribe, Netflix subscribe, renting model, from a car to rent a house Dems to buy to have the ownership of these goods or these assets, because they are not worried about having things but to experience things.

So the user behaviour, it's, it's much more, it's a little bit different than we have some years ago, users won't care about your website, social media content, your app unless it can give them some benefits in one of three ways, solve the problem, address a need, or do something to make them feel better. The users from these generations want to solve a problem, if it's a problem of information or entertainment, they want to solve that problem or address their needs without caring what website or social media, or app they are using. They want to solve their problem, they address the need, or have a nice experience with the content. So they are not keen to be just on a website on a social media profile, they can follow any profile if it solves that problem that needs they have.

“80% of young people prefer to spend their money on experience, not things"

as I said in the study of the Everest group, it was identified that four out of five people prefer to spend their money on experience, not things. And we have to understand that the big expanders that we like to spend money on and consume in the big consumers of the next few years will be the young people of today. And the young people of today prefer to subscribe to a service prefer to rent something, and not to have things. So it's important to understand when we are developing a strategy for any business that nowadays, people, young people want to have the things right now, and one to ever good experience with anything they use. So it's important to understand that nowadays, it's not about the device they're using. It's not about just the content. It's all about the experience they have with the product the service and the content they are experiencing. So that's why nowadays, we speak about user experience instead of the user interface.

Because the products the content, the applications, and the websites must be useful, usable, and desirable as civil and cordial. And also, the content should match user expectations. When any customer nowadays any consumer, any user, assesses a website, assesses a social media profile, assesses an application, they have an expectation. And most of these kinds of expectations are related to the content they are expecting to see some content, they search on Google, and they search on social media. And if the content is not met the expectations they will have been done, they will exit the website, the social media profile the application, and because they are expecting the content they are searching, they are looking for.

User Experience is nowadays very important because people want to be satisfied with the apps with the content with all the devices they are using. So experience is very important. In these two images. On the left, we have an example of an application where the user to fill a text box with numbers has to click on this button to switch to a number keypad. And on the left is the application.

It shows the four, for instance, the keyboard with just numbers, which is more satisfying for users people like to have a good experience and this small example, with the keyboard just adapted for the textbox. It's much more satisfying for users and they feel a very good experience with App. Because they have not they don't have to click a small button to change the keyboard. This is just a little example of how the users are. Nowadays all of us are very lazy with the apps we want. We want everything for now. We don't want to make unnecessary steps to assess the content to do some tests on an app on a social under social media on the website. Because we have a lot of Apps, we have a lot of websites or a lot of social media content that we can use instead of these Contents that are not prepared for a good experience for all users.

Now, I will start to talk about the strategies. Nowadays 58% of aspiring students use social media to research schools to research universities research, higher education institutes, and college, and 61% say they are at least somewhat influenced by their social research. So most users nowadays, before applying to university, sorry, search everything about this university. So it's important to have good content on social media because all of our candidates or most of our candidates will search on social media about our institution.

So now, I will present some examples of social media content marketing strategies that are used nowadays by higher education institutions, like:
• Promoting values and achievements
• Connecting with alumni
• Use storytelling to help students see what is like at your institution
• User-generated content
• Parents and families
• Sharing important updates in real-time
• Real-time content marketing
• Integrating the digital strategy with offline strategy.
• And finally, using digital influencers or alumni influencers.
I will try to show the first example.
That is an example where future candidates, future students of universities can picture their future at the university. These are important because they want to see what the facilities are and how is the campus they are going to experience in the next few years. So it's very important to show them images, and photos of the facilities and the labs the everything that is related to the university. So a showcase of the college's life we treat all tours and student students takeovers is very important because students like to see this kind of content because they understand a little bit more how the university will be and how the opinions of them will be in the next few years.

Another strategy is to promote values and achievements.
This gives current and past students reasons to take pride in their university. And this allowed to create a sense of belonging, this is very important for the current and past students because it's allowed to give a sense of belonging to them, they are proud of their colleagues, they are proud of the achievements of the university. So showing this kind of content, it's a way to give value to all their degrees and all to the professional values that the university has to give them.

Another strategy is to use storytelling to help students see what is like at your institution, creating content that suits your student’s stories about what it's like to attend your institution. And these students can talk about several topics, like clubs and extracurricular activities, on-campus events, and off-campus internships and opportunities. This is also very used nowadays because it helps to show the lifestyle of the university, the lifestyle of all students that study in this higher education institutions. So these strategies are nowadays very much used by institutions.

The next strategy is user-generated content, to encourage students to generate content related to the university organic, with contests, we can give these kinds of encouragement with contests and promote some kinds of contests, give some prizes, to them, curate user-generated content or people like to see how their university is working, how the city is doing their jobs. So it's very important to encourage students to generate content, because this kind of content will be shared with your colleagues with their friends, and it will reach other students and other colleagues that don't follow the social media profiles of the higher education institutions. So it will reach much more people than the normal people that follow the social media profiles of the universities.

Families are very important because students like to see, that's the and also parents like to see that the university has like a big family is like a big family with all the students are the parents or the people, they're related with the students. And on these three examples, we can see that nowadays universities are very, very important for these kinds of approaches because they want to show the students, the candidates, that the university is like a big family, and they have many people. Like, for example, on this right side, on the bottom, we have an example of a university that we use a lot of Porto, the University of Porto that

We have here, six people that have all studied at the same university, and they are all from the same family. And it is so this kind of content can show to the candidates that all these elements of the assembly are satisfied with the courses with the degrees they took at the university.

Also sharing important updates in real-time. It's a strategy that is used nowadays because nowadays, most users use social media profiles and social media news feeds as their primary news source. Many people use social media like Twitter, and Facebook, to, know the news to have information about institutions. So it is very important to share important updates in real-time with students with all the followers of the universities.

Also, it's very important to have real-time content marketing, because this kind of content is auto of engagement. After all, it's related to actual events that are occurring in real-time. So these are

Two examples that show that creating content, we liked it with the popular culture with popular events that are occurring at this time, have a lot of engagement and are used by many universities all over the world.

Another good strategy that is integrating the digital strategy with an offline strategy, like, for example,

The open days of universities of higher education institutions, mixing that strategy and combining the strategy with user-generated content strategies. With these events with his open days, for instance, we can encourage students to encourage candidates to share their experiences during these events. So we can reach more people because we can we will reach more students, more candidates that are friends or colleagues of these students that participate in these events. So it is a good way of reaching more people and people from the target that we want to reach.

And finally, using influencers, it's also nowadays, very popular, because influencers are nowadays, a way to reach more people because they have a lot of followers, they have a lot of engagement. And using influencers can promote quickly in a fast way, diversity with content that is shared by these people. And using popular influencers in each country, it's a way to reach more people and create brand awareness that without the strategy, it's difficult, it's more difficult to gain.

But I think using alumni influencers, it's a better way to promote the university because only helps universities to create valuable and personal contents that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to capture and share. And these are just three examples of universities that use Alumni to promote and share information about their achievements. And their experience in the university. And how valuable this content is for universities is why people from the departments of communication and marketing of these higher education institutions use it because it's very valuable content for forwards for candidates and all the students.

So, I'm concluding with some final considerations about the benefits of social media, and content marketing strategies for higher education.
• These kinds of strategies allow better communication with students and candidates
• Increase brand awareness of university of colleges, and higher education institutions
• Creates a sense of belonging in the students
• Increases the engagement rates and the conversion rate of the leads that we can have in these posts.
• It has a better ability to showcase the University's expertise,
• Allows the creation of user-generated content.
And it also gives another way of promoting that word of mouth with the user-generated content that allows us to reach more students reach more candidates, because when students promote

At the university with user-generated content, we are reaching people that don't follow the letter and follow our profiles. So we will wait. These colleagues and friends of these students are probably on the same target. So it's very important to have user-generated content from our students, and from candidates that participate for instance, in the open base of universities. And finally, it improves the relationship with all students, the actual students are the current students, and also with the alumni students that we can communicate with these kinds of strategies.

So, thank you very much for your attention. I hope you liked my presentation about digital social media content marketing strategies for higher education. And I think it can help your university your college, and your higher education institution to produce real valuable content and to reach more people.