Welcome once again to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), our weekly rundown of key content marketing news items and tech tips for business school admissions and marketing staff! As many b-school admissions professionals are now knee deep in applications (and perhaps snow if you are located on the East Coast of the USA) it’s possible that your program’s use of social media is not top-of-mind at the moment. Of course, the sooner you begin thinking about how to enhance your content marketing efforts for the 2014-15 application cycle, the more likely you will achieve your goals next season. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a handful of helpful stories, tips and news items from the past week…
We’ll start this week with a very interesting study that explores ‘tweet frequency’ and other Twitter behaviors among leading global brands like Google, McDonald’s, Amazon, MTV, etc. While I encourage readers to check out the study, a few key findings include the fact that top brands tweet an average of 12 times each day and that links (in tweets) increase engagement by 150% – with pictures spurring more engagement than shortened URLs (bit.ly, etc.). Clearly the Twitter account for a higher ed institution isn’t the same as the Twitter account for a corporate entity, but there are nonetheless some interesting lessons to be learned about audience engagement from this study. In short, schools should likely be tweeting more often, using more links/pictures in those tweets, and engaging with audience via @messages/replies with greater frequency.
Our next item of note is a rather provocatively titled column that was published earlier this week by Nichole Kelly on the Social Media Explorer web site. The column, Your Content Isn’t Going Viral Because It Sucks, offers a lot of great advice about how to write for reaction and engage with your audience. There are five great clues about what makes for poor content: 1) Lack of emotional appeal, 2) Not ‘Share Worthy’, 3) Bad Timing, 4) Poor Design, 5) Poor Distribution. Check out the article for detailed explanations (and info-graphics) of each of the five clues. A lot of the research that Southwark has done regarding business schools’ use of social media suggests that most programs have room to improve engagement. The guidelines offered in this article are a great start.
We’ll wrap up this week’s WMW with two short items that involve predicting the future. The first comes from Mike Gingerich who offers up some advice around the key trends content marketing folks should be keeping an eye on in 2014. These range from Facebook advertising (and why it’s increasingly attractive) to the rise of Google+ (never count Google out, right?). And finally, for a great lesson in crystal ball gazing, we turn to Dr. Dre and his recent ‘Beats by Dre’ ads (featuring NFL players like Richard Sherman) which seem incredibly prescient and are the topic of much discussion. OK, so that’s all good and well, but what on earth does Dr. Dre have to do with how business schools use social media? The answer is in this article which discusses the Beats by Dre ads and draws some great conclusions about reusing and timing content – something that could be particularly relevant for the higher ed community as they market to a new crop of prospects each season.
Thanks again for reading WMW. See you all next week…
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