“The new reports bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics you care about – allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business.”

The revamped Social Reports, which can be found under the Traffic Source and Social tabs, will identify all the traffic coming from social sites and measure how these social channels are converting visitors to leads.

The Overview Report allows users to easily visualize how social media is directly and indirectly assisting with conversions. In the report below, the largest circle indicates your school’s number of total conversions, or leads. The dark blue circle shows you when social media was the last interaction before a visitor converted into a lead, while the lighter blue circle shows where a visitor interacted with your school via social media but didn’t convert into a lead until a later date.

The Social Plugins Report allows you to measure the social activity that comes from the social plugins on your website, such as clicking on a ‘Like’, ‘Tweet This’ or ‘+1’ button.

Andy and Lauren set a fundraising goal of $1,000. Thanks to family, friends, and people they tweet with on Twitter, they were able to raise $2,655!

“I’m so happy that we were able to more than double our fundraising goal! Thank you to everyone who supported us and Avalanna along the way,” Lauren said.

Back in February Lauren and her sister, Leslie, launched a social media campaign in hopes of helping Avalanna Routh, a 6 year-old girl suffering from a rare type of brain cancer (AT/RT), fulfill her dream of meeting Justin Bieber. The story quickly went viral, spreading across the globe. Just eight days after Lauren helped to launch the social media campaign, Avalanna was flown to New York City to meet her man.

 Will they be running again next year? “Yes!” Both Andy and Lauren said.

You can check out more photos of Andy and Lauren throughout the National College Blue Ridge Marathon on Effective Student Marketing’s page on Facebook!

Learn more about Atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor (AT/RT).

Photo credit: National College

Photo credit: National College

Let’s say you run ads on TV, do some online display buys, social media and billboards, the first thing a prospective student is going to do after viewing these ads is search for your brand term.  Search engines are used both as a navigational tool (people rarely type in a URL directly) and as a first line of research. Scanning down the SERP after searching on your school’s name, a prospective student can gauge fairly well if you’re providing a good service.

Let’s look at some examples…

Take a look at results for the search term “itt tech.” Clearly there are some negative reviews out there for the school that are taking over the SERP, 4 out of the 11 organic listings have a negative connotation.

ITT Tech SERP Results

If a prospective student sees a video that says “ITT Tech Sucks” or “ITT Tech is a SCAM,” chances are they are not going to enroll. But, let’s say they do decide to ignore the warning signs and click on the itttech.edu site these negative sentiments are still going on in the back of their mind, therefore making it a harder enrollment process.

How about another example…

The incorporation of ratings directly on the SERPs can also have a huge impact on your brand terms’ performance. Look here at Bradford College Columbus, a whopping 3 stars plopped right next to their organic listing. Not to mention the repeated call out of 3 stars on multiple other organic listings on the SERP.  All of the advertising that is driving branded searches has become less effective because once the prospect searched, they saw bad reviews.

Bradford School Columbus SERP Reviews

Long gone are the days where students have to dig to find out what kind of reputation a school has; it is laid out for them during the first steps of their research.

The question is: what are you doing to help save your school’s reputation on Google?

Colleges can reach potential students easily, engaging teenagers to fun events being held on campus like open houses, sporting events, and much more! By colleges showing themselves to be more “social” per say, on the web, potential students are more likely to be drawn to these schools and to click through to the college website to gather more information about programs and study subjects that are offered. Pinterest is a fun way to send messages by promoting events, posting book store items, and posting sports schedules.

Colleges already on Pinterest use it to recruit potential students by posting pictures of the campus, pictures of events that were recently held at the school, and pictures of current students having fun attending these events.  Some other boards on these college pages also include boards for current students and even alumni.  Pin it boards have tips on how to dress for interviews, what to expect when interviewing, how to search for a job in different industries, and many more similar to these.  When potential students see these pictures, they are engaged with the school and definitely put your school on their mind.

Do you have a Pinterest account? How is your school or company taking advantage of this new social media platform? Let us know!

-Adriana

The online world is a vast place and prospective students don’t always manage to make their way to a school’s website for answers; many opt for social media, review sites, and forums for their answers – and this makes it critical to know what is being said about the school online.

By being aware of what’s online, schools can respond to concerns and questions, correct erroneous information and get a jump start on breaking news relating to the school.

Below are a few examples of online reputation management for one school:

The above reputation management items show that the school was able to interact with a prospective student and provide the information she was looking for; correct misinformation in a negative review and offer to help resolve the former student’s problem. The last item was breaking news of a lawsuit being filed against the school. The school was made aware of the tweeted information from the press conference before it was reported through TV news casts or newspapers, allowing more time to formulate a PR strategy.

-Marcy

We came back to Effective Student Marketing with some great new ideas to use with our clients in higher education marketing.

Although we sat in on dozens of sessions on dozens of different topics, it was obvious that there were some reoccurring themes at the conference. Here are the 5 Key Takeaways from #SESNY 2012:

1) Content is king, but local content is god. This was definitely the biggest themes of SESNY this year! In nearly every session we attended, the presenters spoke about the importance of creating content that’s tailored to your target audience.

Key Takeaway: Know your audience, what they’re interested in, and what type of content they like best.

2) SEO is more social than ever, so make sharing your content as easy as possible. Know which social sites are popular with your target audience and promote your content there. Engage with your audience and reward them for their interaction.

Key Takeaway: Share your content, share it often, and others will share it too!

3) Mobile has arrived! The big users of mobile happen to be the big spenders, 18 to 34 year-olds, and also the target audience for higher education marketing. These users are highly motivated consumers and they’re searching at the speed of light, so appearing above the fold is more important than ever.

Key Takeaway: Your mobile site can’t just be good; it’s got to be great. If your mobile users don’t have a good experience, they’ll move on quickly, most likely to your competitors.

4) Personalize your email messages the way you personalize your blog content. Show the recipient you know them and by referencing past emails they clicked on. For higher education marketing, send emails to an existing leads that are program specific and suggest similar programs they might be interested in.

Key takeaway: Personalizing your email messages is a great tool for nurturing your leads and upselling to them.

5) Link building is an art form that requires finesse. The best way to get quality links pointing to your site is by forming relationships with independent bloggers who are the experts in your field. The anchor text they use to link to your site needs to include your keywords, so ask nicely.

Key Takeaway: Treat these bloggers like humans and offer them incentives to link to your content, like free stuff or fresh content.

-Jennifer

1. In-line styles are you best friend and they will never fail you! Some email clients permit the use of CSS styles in the <head>, but not all, so don’t count on that! Instead, bring your styles in-line. In-line styles can be defined within a variety of tags and are usually successful at overriding any funky code that will try to pop up.
2. Background images will only work as an attribute to the main <table> tag. Background images within nested tables will not work.  Email can have a large background that is behind the entire email, but if you want a text section within your email to have its own image background, the text must be in the image and not within the code.
3. Nested tables sometimes create extra breaks. If you use them, be sure to define a background color so that the user won’t see the extra space that could ruin your design. Always assume that extra spaces will sometimes appear after the closing <td> tag, so design accordingly.
4. Use breaks <br> instead of <p> tags. If you only use <p> tags, there might not be spaces in between paragraphs in some email clients, but if you use double breaks <br><br> you can ensure that your paragraphs will be separated.
5. Another factor of using a lot of images in email is that the spam rating it gets. Most email deployment programs give a spam rating per email that is based on image to text ratio. Generally, emails that have more images and less text don’t even make it into a user’s inbox and go straight into their spam. It’s a delicate balance between images and text, so you want to use your images wisely and sparingly.
6. Always set image boarders to zero. Some browsers and email clients automatically add a border to image which could throw off the whole template.
7. A physical mailing address is required by law.  This information is usually not within the email design itself but must be parsed in through whichever email program application you are deploying through. Take this into account when designing (i.e. if you include an image footer that has the physical address, the address will probably appear in the email twice. It’s not a big deal but is something to think about).
8. Put your most important content above the fold. Keep it simple – less is more! Get your point across before the user loses interest.
9. Don’t have too many different links. Depending on your content, if you really only want the user to go to one landing page, have everything link to that one landing page and use relevant images.
10. You can’t embed a video inside your email template, but a screenshot of the video that links to it is just as effective! Some email clients like Gmail even recognize YouTube video links and let you play them within the email client (similar to what Facebook does with a YouTube video link).

If you’re still having trouble with your email marketing campaigns, check out our Education Alerts services. We help you stay in touch with the prospects in your database through email newsletters, class start reminders, and other content.

The infographic below demonstrates many of the new features and functions that you and your social media team should familiarize yourself with if you haven’t already:

Infographic credit: Edalman Digital

How is your school going to take advantage of Facebook Timeline? Let us know, we’d love to hear!

-Lauren

• • Cover Photo
• • Profile Photo
• • Custom Tab Photo or Logo
• • Shared Photo
• • Highlighted Photo
• • Milestone Photo
• • Custom Tab Page

Infographic credit: Jon Loomer

Remember, all pages will automatically be switching over to Timeline on Friday, March 30, so be sure your college is prepared!

-Mike

For years we’ve been hearing “mobile is coming, mobile is coming!” and after seeing minimal change in analytics, everyone had just about likened the phrase to calling wolf.

Now, after waiting years for its arrival, mobile is finally here. Taking a deep dive into a number of school’s analytics we found that mobile traffic was increased 200% from November 2010 to 2011, making up a whopping 30% of all site traffic.

Mobile Traffic

In order to take advantage of this growing market we built mobile optimized websites for our top schools and ran online ads targeting mobile users. The results: A 493% increase in online leads plus an additional 460+ mobile click-to-calls.

Best part? This isn’t the end of mobile’s growth. As Androids and iPhones become commodities we can expect the majority of prospective students, graduates and employers will be using mobile web browser to explore your school.

So, the question is do you have a mobile optimized site? Mobile marketing plan? Mobile strategy?