REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR TWITTER STRATEGY: When you have a small admissions or marcomm team, it's incredibly hard to have the resources and the bandwidth to know what to do on social media day in and day out. That's especially true when all that's on your mind is an upcoming application deadline, which ultimately turns into you filling your social media promotions with timely reminders. To keep engaging with your prospects, you'll definitely want to have a balance of reminders with other interesting, informative content. Fortunately, you don't have to reinvent the wheel — you can peek into what your competitors have posted around similar timeframes and see how their posts performed. Here's how to reverse engineer your Twitter strategy:
Visit a Twitter profile for an institution and copy their handle (it could be a direct competitor or a school whose social strategy you admire). Let's take a look at the University of Michigan as an example.
Go to Twitter Advanced Search and add their handle in the section "from these accounts," then add the dates you're interested in and hit "search." Let's take a look pre-Covid at the time period April 1, 2019 through April 30, 2019.
Practicing this exercise will help you see what other schools are posting about (and what they aren't!) and how much engagement they're getting on various topics within a period of time. It will also help you brainstorm new ideas when you're in a bit of a creative wasteland.
Shameless plug 🔌 We dive into this further in a recent FRIdeas — FRIdeas #39: How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Twitter Strategy…and Up Your Own Game While You’re At It.
HOW TO BOOST YOUR WEBSITE PERFORMANCE: An important search ranking factor for Google, website load time is worth paying special attention to — especially when your prospects are Millennials or Gen Z and have little patience for websites that take a hair too long to load. And when your website is full of visual elements, your load time can suffer. Good news — Website Builder Expert put together a helpful website image optimization guide so you can keep all your beautiful photos while improving your conversions, website speed, and SEO. Check, check, and check. Here are some key stats and tips:
Shameless plug 🔌 For more SEO tips for enrollment marketers, don't miss our blog "SEO Hacks for Higher Ed Marketers with Little-to-No Time, Money, or SEO Knowledge."
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