Simplifying Social Media

Simplifying Social Media to Reach Prospects and Students 

The power and reach of social media cannot be understated—influencing how people connect, communicate, gather information, and form opinions. In fact, social networks now represent 20% of all time spent online, and reach over 75% of all adult internet users.

As those numbers continue to increase, social media may arguably represent the most powerful new opportunity for schools to connect with prospects and students. According to research from Noel-Levitz, 70 percent of prospective students want colleges and universities to create a social presence online, and more than half (51%) want to be contacted directly through a social network.

Despite this, the majority of schools are still struggling to find effective ways to leverage social media effectively. A number of factors are to blame, from confusion over who "owns" social media to a lack of dedicated staff and an inability to measure success clearly. However, with growing pressure to join the world of social networking, school marketers must find ways to overcome these challenges. Recently, CUnet launched a new product dedicated to helping marketers in higher education do exactly that.

SocialThumb, CUnet's Social Media Management system, allows school marketers to manage their entire social media presence through a single dashboard. By integrating platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, SocialThumb allows you to streamline the publishing process, post to multiple locations in a single step, track and monitor online activity, and automatically measure the ROI of school campaigns.

With SocialThumb in place, schools can simplify their social media efforts, while extending their reach. Here's how it works.

1. Schedule and manage your social media activity—When you log into SocialThumb's web-based interface, you are presented with an easy-to-use dashboard that allows you to schedule and manage your social media activity. For schools that have multiple authors active on social media, there is also the option to assign activity to your contributors. With clear workflow and approval paths built into the system, you can also ensure that any content is approved by a senior staff member before being published.

2. Get more attention for your posts—Since SocialThumb integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, and more, you can take one post, and easily multiply its reach and readership. With features that allow you to schedule not just the posting of content, but the reposting of content, you can effectively set up your own "rolling thunder" campaigns to extend your reach and keep content active long after the initial post date, without any additional time or effort on your part.

3. Listen and communicate—The Social Inbox makes it easy to track and monitor social media activity as it happens, and then gives you the option to quickly respond and engage with students and prospects.

4. Measure and report on your success—Beyond simple monitoring, SocialThumb provides extensive analytics allowing users to easily track activity, engagement, and reach with key audiences; measure the effectiveness of different channels; and measure basic sentiment.

Whether you want to manage your social media efforts yourself, or you are looking for help, CUnet has the products and services to meet your school's needs. From social media expertise to software and technology, we can help your school engage and interact with online communities to attract students, keep them engaged, and then build strong alumni relationships.

To request more information about our services, contact us.