MSL Chicago

Higher Education and Social Influence: Where Does Your School Rank? by Nancy Brennan

In the face of budget cuts, lower endowments and a fiercely competitive market for talent, colleges and universities are coming to terms with the need to be creative in their efforts to attract the best and brightest in students and faculty. At the same time, they know they’ve got to focus on building stronger relationships with virtually anyone who can positively impact their balance sheet — alumni, philanthropists, government, etc. So what’s the new metric for marketing success that everyone is focused on? “Engagement.”

Many schools (and major brands) are still trying to navigate social engagement and influence online—especially as these communications continue to evolve. At MSL, we’re constantly using new tools and techniques to help our higher education clients listen and analyze the conversation.

The team at MSL Chicago took a quick look at which universities and colleges are doing the best job of engagement online. The metric we used was the institution’s overall online influence, as measured by a Klout score. (Klout uses data from social networks to measure the influence of the institution by looking at how often and how broadly the content created drives action). The results are interesting:

What’s most interesting to us is the mix of schools with top scores — you’ve got top Big Ten universities with huge and passionate alumni bases focused on athletics and there are also prestige academic powers like Harvard mixed in the group. The schools are located in virtually every geographic area and they feature different areas of academic strength— they attract entirely different student bodies.

As a marketer, my big takeaway is that there isn’t a “winning” formula that helps spark engagement. It goes back to defining your brand — finding the differentiators and making that brand come to life for all those you want to reach.

What do you see in the results?

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