Instagram is Getting Rid of Likes, so What's the Big Deal?

Written by The Enrollify Team | 12/2/19 12:29 PM

PUSH LEADS DOWN THE FUNNEL WIIHT ONLINE INFO SESSIONS: Running a weekly info session or webinar is a great way to engage leads and prospective customers. But making your live broadcast engaging, relevant, and meaningful can be tricky if you don’t have the right resources. If a prospective customer is willing to join your webinar or info session, chances are they’re pretty far down the buyer's journey or funnel. A poor experience on the webinar at this stage of the funnel could be a deal breaker to your audience. HubSpot’s article on 12 traits of a successful webinar can help you utilize this marketing channel to turn leads into paying customers and avoid negative webinar experiences.

Why you should care: Weekly or monthly online information sessions allow prospective students to ask questions, interface with your program, and even learn about financial aid opportunities in a more fluid manner. But a poor experience during an information session can also be a deal breaker and ultimately discourage students from applying. Be sure to make online info sessions interactive, such as including faculty for a Q&A portion. And make sure to heed the advice of your attendees through post-session surveys.

WHAT IS NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING?: Have you experienced a Google search result that provided information that wasn’t actually helpful to answering your question? While content may be optimized for SEO, Google’s natural language processing (NPL) constantly seeks to truly understand what users are looking for. By analyzing salience (“to what extent is this piece of content about a specific entity?”), Google can interpret the relevancy of your content to the true intent behind a user’s question or search.

Why you should care: Enrollment marketers often face wordsmithing dilemmas. “What should I name this guide?” “What should this page title be?” Though you may think you’ve created a guide to STEM degrees for career changers, you may have actually only written one paragraph about career changers and then 5 paragraphs about STEM degrees. As Google becomes more intelligent with natural language processing, content that doesn’t actually address the queries asked by users (though your technical SEO may be properly optimized) may lose spots in the search results rankings..

INSTAGRAM IS GETTING RID OF LIKES, SO WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?: Instagram is removing public validation from photo and video posts on its platform by getting rid of “Like” counts. Teenagers and influencers alike are wondering how the world will know their content and videos are popular, and if follower counts will drop as a result. But for us content marketers, what’s the impact? You’ll still be able to see the number of impressions and likes a post receives on the reporting platform. But it brings us to another question, should we really be using “Likes” as a key performance indicator of your organic Instagram posts and ads?

Why you should care: If you’re an enrollment marketer who’s actually concerned about Instagram removing likes, chances are you’re focusing on the wrong KPI’s from your Instagram efforts. Let it be a refreshing reminder on the ultimate purpose of posting anything to Instagram in higher education– new prospective students and conversions, not just “Likes”. This is where having a system that tracks attribution (linking your newly sourced lead to your Instagram efforts) is key.

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