Engagement
What have you found engages your students on social media?
We found employment opportunites and student success stories very helpful when it comes to engaging our students. When you reach out to your student by letting them know there opportunity for them it gets them excited.
Family and friends. These types of posts can reveal what's important to the student, where they are spending much of their time and sometimes indicate where they are working.
Kenton,
Alumni, particularly older alumni, tend to want to continue being associated and involved with their alma mater when they perceive that it holds prestige. Consider how your department and entire school works toward a long-term branding strategy that shapes this perception. Sharing stories of prominent alumni success, awards/honors bestowed upon the school, etc. can help in this regard. The more proud alumni feel about their school, the more affinity they will have toward the brand. Award programs help with this as well. It is recommended to have a "master" plan that outlines your message - what are the core "talking points" that align to the strategy. Then, create a content calendar to decide ahead of time what you will publish that aligns with message. Use content curation tools to help find content like Google Alerts. Get Google alerts and Google News Alerts as feeds and use feedly.com to centralize and organize all curated content. This helps manage the process of curating content. Scheduling tools like BufferApp and HootSuite help manage the publishing process.
Pictures generate the most engagement in terms of people liking and commenting. Any post that has to do with the students, pictures of the students, or campus life in general is most well received. I've found that articles get very little attention. Updates on what is going on or new things the school is participating in is typically right there in the middle and will get notice from a couple people.
DEFINITELY success stories from graduates. I am able to post headline stories (with links) on our alumni platform (360alumni). Assessing the reach of each post is easy with their metrics,and by far any post about successful graduates gets a lot more clicks and reads than pretty much anything else. So, this definitely shows us that it really does make sense to take the time to see what the students/alumni want to read about - and change our posts/strategy accordingly. In the past, CS members thought that posting a lot of articles, etc. was good enough - and they were engaging the audience.
Posting pictures of students and graduates engages our students the most. Also, sending out Congratulations when a graduate is hired also engages them.
I've noticed that when I post success stories on Linkedin that this gets students and alumni very excited. On our Alumni360 page I post events such as career fairs that are being held at the Unv and other locations, ans alumni seem to appreciate this information. Current students and alumni also enjoy hearing about our placement statistics and gainful employment stats because this shows them that we really are here for a reason and can be a great asset to them with their job search.
Job postings and alumni communication
Sought after job posting, networking opportunities with celebrities and other high profile professionals and displaying/congratulating student work.
Hi Sheri,
Has there been any research done to identify the platforms your "Allied Health Students" are already currently using and what they use them for? This in itself is likely to reveal where they may fall on the social Technographics Ladder (referenced in the "Getting Your Career Center Started on Facebook" resource in the course). The best way to find out how students use social media is to ask the students themselves. For instance, you could survey them and ask questions like:
1. Do you use social media? (Find out if they are active and get a sense of the percentage that are inactives)
2. Which platform do you use most? (Identify the most predominantly used platforms which should guide your strategy on the ones your office will use)
3. The number one activity I use social media for is to... Read blogs, watch videos, join in on discussions, look at updates from people/pages I follow, stay informed on important events/news, write blog articles, etc. (This may give insight on how they prefer to engage which gives you insights on your content strategy)
4. What career-related information most interests you? (Industry specific updates/news, Articles from industry leaders, Tips on Job Search, Interviewing, etc.) Finding out what career-related information students are most interested in would also help you identify specific topics that most interest your students so you can tailor your content strategy to the topics that interest them the most.
Whereas there are some "universal" things that data reveals social media users typically respond to most (such as liking/commenting on posted photos), the true way to understand your unique audience is to research them specifically.
Robert Starks Jr.
We do not have an established Social Media platform at this time. However, I am confident that content that is specific to the audience (program specific) that requires them to do something (like the page, post a response or picture)and provides a reward (prize, shout-out, recognition) would be most successful. Any suggestions to engage allied health students? I find they are the most difficult to motivate.
Our students are most engaged by connecting to their fellow students and sharing their videos, posts, and pics. As a film and TV school we require for video projects to be uploaded to Youtube and shared through other social media platforms. This also creates health competition amongst them. Who has the most hits, followers, etc... At the end of the day the more they share their videos, the more they promote themselves.
job opportunity posts gets the most responses
whenever we post job opportunity and campus events
We have found that posting things that are relevant to our students is the best way to stay engaged with our students.
We always try to post the following things:
- job opportunities- This is something that seems to get the attention of all of our graduates. It also gets the attention of our community partners because they know we have graduates looking for work.
- job fairs
- networking opportunities
- events/ awareness walks/ cause marketing and so forth.
Meaningful and relevant content and information.
Job opportunities. Especially the students that are really wanting to get any leads on possible future employers.
We have found that other graduates comments can generate more response and interest. I guess it is the peer pressure thing. If someone else is posting about a great job or passing their test or getting licensed others feel the pressure to be competitive.
