Graduate business school recruiting is a high-stakes game, considering students may easily pay $100,000+ for an executive MBA program. And with 6,000 business programs around the world vying for top candidates, higher ed marketers need every advantage to reach prospects. Until fairly recently, marketers have concentrated on email campaigns to generate leads among known prospects – a hit-and-miss strategy since many prospects either don’t share their email address or don’t open the messages they receive. Social media has provided business schools with new ways to reach potential candidates. According to GMAC’s 2016 mba.com Prospective Students Survey Report, 96% of prospective students use social media and 67% use it to learn about graduate education opportunities. LinkedIn is proving to be marketers’ digital platform of choice for reaching high-quality candidates. With its emphasis on professional connections and career advancement, it’s a natural gathering place for those who might be most interested in prestigious business programs. In addition, a recent study showed that for half of the respondents “friends, family and peers were most influential when considering further education — second only to the institution’s website. And professional networks were twice as influential as personal social networks.” And as candidates look to their LinkedIn connections for guidance, marketers are able to engage prospective students through relevant content and gradually encourage them to move through the enrolment funnel.

Social Media Metrics? TechTarget defines Social Media Metrics as “the use of data to gauge the impact of social media activity on a company’s revenue”.  The main goal of social media metrics is to determine the impact of social media on a company’s goals. There are many social media metric tools available now but which ones should you use? And when you use them do you know what they are used for? What are they measuring? How do they impact your company? I have discovered these questions to be quite confusing and I end up feeling unsure of even where to start when I think of measuring social media efforts.

Social Media and sports are seemingly made to go hand in hand.  By just looking at the social media accounts of some of the top sports teams you can see the size of their following and get a feel for the digital conversations they are starting.   With millions of sports fans taking to social media to discuss their favourite teams and players, a great deal of analytical data is being created.  What organizations do with that data is becoming ever more important in their ability to gain an edge on their competition and becoming a driving force in their digital marketing plans.

Brandwatch is the world’s leading social intelligence company, they are used throughout large corporations as a tool for analyzing and sharing insights about social media. Brandwatch’s objective is to take regular analytics and share them with their clients in way that is attractive and understandable. The information shared by the company tells their clients about the conversations, trends, and people impacting their business. Their technology spans over 80 million online sources to ensure they, ‘never miss a mention that matters’. Brandwatch is a unique and futuristic company that, “gathers millions of online conversations every day and provides users with the tools to analyze them, empowering the world’s most admired brands and agencies to make insightful, data-driven business decisions.”