The fact that 78% of colleges employ specialized PR or marketing staff highlights the vital role of PR in educational institutions.
This is also true for K-12 institutions. According to the National School Public Relations Association, 98% of school administrators see PR as essential to their district’s success.
Read Social Listening Guide: Strategies and Tools
But, an effective public relations strategy isn’t complete without a social media component that fosters strong community engagement, monitors feedback, tracks public sentiment, and swiftly addresses issues.
All this is possible with a social media monitoring tool. This blog post will explore social media monitoring and how to apply it to your school or university’s reputation management efforts.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring tracks conversations, mentions, and trends across various social media platforms to gather insights.
It includes listening to people’s opinions, analyzing their comments and sentiments, and identifying emerging trends.
Read How to Use Social Media Listening to Humanize Your Brand
Educational institutions have a unique need to monitor mentions on social media because they serve a dynamic audience of students, parents, and alumni.
Schools and universities aim to enhance student engagement and experience, maintain alumni relations, support fundraising efforts, and manage crises.
How to get started with social media monitoring for your school or university
Follow these tips to create a social media monitoring strategy that allows your institution to ensure a positive online presence, engage with stakeholders and community members, manage crises proactively, and maintain a strong reputation.
Set clear goals for your monitoring efforts
Define clear objectives for your social media monitoring strategy. When you set goals, ensure they align with your institution’s overall strategic priorities.
For example, if your school or university wants to increase engagement, your primary focus might be to monitor student feedback and engagement.
Read Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring
Having clear objectives will guide your monitoring activities and help you measure success.
Choose a social media monitoring tool
If you haven’t yet invested in technology to streamline your social media monitoring process, it’s time to start.
While manual monitoring is possible, it can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s challenging to keep track of every relevant conversation, mention, and trend across various social media platforms. Due to its limited scope, you might miss important mentions or trends. This can be a significant problem if your institution has a large online presence.
Also, gathering data is just one piece of the puzzle. Even if you successfully track mentions by doing manual searches and scans, your job isn’t done because you must make sense of all the data.
Analyzing large volumes of data without automation can be overwhelming and prone to errors.
Automated social media monitoring tools offer advanced analytics, sentiment analysis, and reporting capabilities that streamline the process and provide deeper insights.
Many great tools are out there to help you track social media mentions and sentiment. And most of them offer features like:
- Keyword and hashtag tracking
- Mentions and alerts
- Competitor analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- Detailed reporting
- Trend analysis
However, you might find solutions with more advanced features, like AI-powered analytics. For example, Determ’s Synthia AI assistant has natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that help you quickly identify key insights and trends from your data.
Considering that only 20.7% of PR and marketing professionals feel comfortable working with data, this feature is necessary to help you become more efficient.
The screenshot below shows Synthia in action. With just a click of a button, you can get a quick summary of top mentions, sentiment, and more.
Proactively manage your school’s reputation
Regularly monitor social media platforms for mentions of your institution’s name, logo, and key personnel.
This can help you stay informed about public perception and quickly identify issues. Use keyword tracking to capture all relevant mentions, including common misspellings and variations of your institution’s name.
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This X post includes a mention of the University of Phoenix by the Los Angeles Football (LAFC) highlighting a partnership.
Monitoring these types of mentions can help you understand the context and impact of your collaborations.
The post is positive, showing appreciation for educators at UOPX. Monitoring tools would help you identify this type of sentiment. That way, you can understand public perception and the effectiveness of your messaging.
Get ahead of crises
In a 2023 survey by PwC, 75% of respondents said technology helped them coordinate a crisis management response.
One such technology they were probably referring to was social media monitoring tools. If a crisis occurs, you can use social media monitoring to gauge the public’s reaction to the event.
Use those insights from monitoring to craft and release timely, accurate, and consistent statements to address misinformation and provide updates.
In 2015, the University of Oklahoma was under fire after a video surfaced showing members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity singing a racist chant. The chant included derogatory language and expressed discriminatory views.
The university responded by expelling the fraternity and shutting down its charter. It even made long-term changes by hiring a director of diversity and inclusion.
Using social media monitoring can help schools and universities in these types of crises by analyzing feedback. It’s possible that the University of Oklahoma leveraged it to understand the best way to respond to the situation and what specific actions its audience would likely agree with.
Facilitating Disaster Recovery
Natural disasters and technical failures can cause data loss, disrupting social media monitoring. Using different strategies and tools can help prepare for and recover from these events.
Reliable data backup and recovery solutions are essential for maintaining the integrity and availability of important information. Among these, S3 backups stand out as a particularly effective tool. They help educational institutions quickly recover lost social media data, reduce downtime, and monitor social media smoothly.
Guage public perception through sentiment analysis
According to our research, 32% of brands recognize the importance of measuring emotional tone and perception.
Educational institutions likely appreciate it more so because understanding sentiment helps them create a supportive and engaging environment for students, faculty, and alumni. This is crucial for fostering community, ensuring student satisfaction, and maintaining a positive institutional reputation.
Use your social media monitoring tool’s sentiment analysis feature to assess the tone of social media conversations about your institution.
This can help you understand the overall mood and identify areas where your institution is doing well or needs improvement. With sentiment analysis, you’ll gain actionable insights for improving communication and addressing concerns.
Monitor shifts in sentiment regularly to detect issues or positive trends. A sudden change in sentiment can indicate a potential crisis or an opportunity to capitalize on a positive development.
Proactively monitoring sentiment can help you respond effectively and maintain a positive image.
Create resonate content with a strong content strategy
According to PRWeek and Cision, 7 in 10 public relations professionals struggle with creating compelling content. Perhaps part of the reason why is that they often have trouble understanding what type of content resonates with their target audience.
This may be especially difficult for schools because they have different audience segments, including students, faculty and staff, alumni, the local community, prospective employees, parents, investors, donors, and sponsors.
Social media monitoring can help your school or university create tailored content for various audiences by providing insights into their interests, concerns, and conversations.
Tracking and analyzing social media activity also allows you to identify trending topics, gather feedback, and understand the needs of students, parents, and other key audience segments.
As a result, you can produce relevant, engaging, and timely content that enhances engagement and strengthens community bonds. Collaborating with professional event photographers can further enrich your content strategy by providing high-quality images that capture significant moments and highlight your institution’s achievements.
This Instagram post showcases Tennessee High School’s Mighty Viking Band receiving a prestigious award. The positive update appeals to various audiences, including current students, parents, alumni, and the local community.
If the high school used a social media monitoring tool, it could track mentions and feedback to ensure the post was well-received and impactful. If it is, its PR and marketing teams can continue sharing this content since it resonates well with the target audience.
Establish a consistent monitoring routine
Set up automated monitoring routines to streamline the process and receive real-time alerts for significant events.
Establish a regular schedule for reviewing social media mentions. Depending on the volume of activity and your school or university’s needs, this could be daily, weekly, or monthly.
Build strong relationships through alumni & community engagement
Monitor interactions with alumni on social media to understand their sentiments and interests. Engaging with alumni can strengthen their connection to your institution and encourage them to become advocates or donors.
Highlight and celebrate the achievements of your alumni and community members. This helps foster a sense of pride and loyalty and showcases the success of your institution’s graduates. Personalized engagement can enhance the sense of community and belonging.
On its Facebook page, St. Thomas More Catholic Church and School-Munster in Indiana thanked its 2020 alumni for coming out to reconnect with their alma mater.
The post captures a sense of community and pride, critical to strengthening bonds between schools and their former students.
Monitoring these types of interactions on social media can help educational institutions understand how alumni engage with the school and what kinds of events or content resonate with them.
Maintain an A+ reputation with social media monitoring
Effectively monitoring what your audience is saying about your institution is crucial to staying ahead in the academic sector.
It can be tricky to do this well since students are the primary stakeholders. They’re the future. Their opinions and experiences matter a lot, as do the opinions of your staff, alumni, and community.
All these groups contribute to your institution’s reputation and influence its success.
Determ can help you better navigate reputation management so that your school or university maintains a positive and influential presence in your community.
Why choose this tool for social media monitoring? Learn all about the Determ difference.
Author’s Bio Britney Steele was born and raised in Atlanta, Britney is a freelance writer with 5+ years of experience. She has written for a variety of industries, including marketing, technology, business, finance, healthcare, wellness, and fitness. If she’s not spending her time chasing after three little humans and two four-legged friends, you can almost always find her glued to a book or awesome TV series.
