All recruitment conversations with students lead to careers.
Disagree? Convince us otherwise.
When prospective students ask about your top programs, they’re really inquiring about their career paths. Questions about student outcomes? They’re assessing their post-degree job prospects. Asking about your institution’s rankings? They are assessing how your degree will play on their CV as they apply for jobs. Inquiring about alumni connections? Clearly thinking about their career network. Calculating your institution’s ROI? All about grads’ salaries.
Look to our recent Know Your Neighborhood (KYN) survey where a full 84% of respondents view career advancement as their primary motivation for studying abroad. Over 99% will tell you this is also their family’s top reason for pushing them forward. So, career opportunities matter – a whole lot.
Which begs the question: If prospective students are thinking about careers so much and you have a thoughtful, creative (not stale) social media presence (you do, right?), then wouldn’t it make sense to weave LinkedIn, the top social media platform for the career-minded, into your marketing strategy? Especially when it comes to your graduate programs. More reasons? Consider your referral sources including your alumni network and adjacent target audiences like high school counselors and consulate staff. Turns out, LinkedIn is where these folks live and the platform could be a great place for your institution to connect with a career-minded (read as "less playful") tone.
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The latest data from LinkedIn shows its network boasts over 1 billion registered users from 200 countries and regions worldwide. That said, per We Are Social, only 1 in 3 (or somewhere between 330 – 350 million) are active on a monthly basis. This is not Tik Tok! Still the numbers are high enough to matter and much more audience targeted. Within these data you can also find 136,000 schools listed. Yours is likely among them.
Impressive numbers overall, though at some point these supersized stats can feel a bit meaningless. That's why we write about them - unearthing sense from the writhing mess that is social media.
The following numbers may be more tangible for your recruitment work: 50.6% of LinkedIn users worldwide are between the ages of 25 and 34; 24.5% are 18 to 24 (Statista). Further, it’s the 4th most used social platform among our KYN respondents (prospective international students), falling in line behind #1 Facebook, #2 YouTube, and #3 Instagram. Where they use other platforms for entertainment, connecting with friends, and yes, research, they turn to LinkedIn with far more specific tasks in mind. It's all about career opportunities. Perhaps your case for building a LinkedIn recruitment strategy is beginning to take shape.
Fact is, institutions like yours are increasingly using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool. Its professional focus and networking capabilities make it useful for connecting with career-oriented prospects, particularly those seeking higher degrees, as well as alumni who are arguably your ultimate word of mouth advocates. Not sure if you’re getting the most out of your institution’s account? We’ll tell you how.
This post is a great read for those involved in the details of your social media execution as well as those trying to evaluate the value of the platform in your overall strategy. Be sure to forward it along to the right folks on your team. Read on…
Admittedly, it was validating to see the number from our KYN research respondents who said they use LinkedIn for their study abroad research. LinkedIn has historically been considered a social channel for businesspeople, not students. And it’s true, a whole lot of Instagram and Tik Tok users are not giving LinkedIn the time of day.
But knowing how career-oriented international students are, many whose sights are on OPT, it makes sense that LinkedIn is a valuable tool for them. The platform has become a useful tactic to reach prospective students – international or domestic – seeking higher degrees as well as your nontraditional (read "older") prospects currently in the workforce.
So here it is:
5 Tips for Boosting the Value of LinkedIn for Your Institution
1. Optimize Your LinkedIn Page
- Build a compelling LinkedIn profile that includes the key information you want prospective students to know. Think popular programs, success metrics, recent accolades, and the industries that employ your graduates.
- Use visually interesting high-quality images and videos that showcase your campus, facilities, and student life. Note: Video is now the fastest growing format on this platform with uploads up 34% year-over-year. Keep them compellingly brief (15 to 90 seconds), though there is room for linking thought leadership with videos of truly engaging lectures from your amazing faculty hashtagging popular career paths (AI and Cybersecurity anyone?). See tip #2 below.
- Take advantage of LinkedIn’s Showcase Pages to provide more targeted content per audience. Pages can be siloed by programs, degrees level, alumni, etc.
2. Make Content a Priority
- Treat your LinkedIn account like the news source it is by posting regularly about your graduate programs, alumni successes, faculty achievements, and intriguing research activity. Approach your LInkedIn content marketing as a useful tool for readers.
- Build a vibrant Life page to showcase your institution’s culture as well as the contributions and career paths of your international students. Be sure to keep this page fresh. Alumni success stories and career advice are welcome news when you are trying to figure out your own future.
- Keep it interesting by posting in a variety of formats including articles, documents, videos, etc., featuring faculty, students, alumni, even parents to demonstrate your institution’s core values and offerings.
- Be responsive to comments, messages, and inquiries. Promptly engage with prospective students and provide them with the information they need. Sounds simple, and it is, but it requires vigilance and staff time. Social media is all about connection as are career networks.
3. Engage with Alumni Around the World
- Create alumni groups. Alumni are among your best advocates and LinkedIn makes it so much easier to stay connected. Create groups by region, country, or program. Build rapport among the group members so they may be more inclined to help in student recruitment initiatives be it attending a student fair you can’t make or joining a webinar for prospective students. (Tip: If you don’t have an international alumni strategy yet, this tool will help you get started. Check it out!)
- Share success stories of alumni who have gone on to successful careers. Highlight how your program helped them achieve their goals. Develop a content plan that brings thought leadership and news by degree program. Give your alumni a place to showcase their own career successes and watch great content and followers accumulate.
4. Consider Paid, Targeted Advertising
- Pay for increased engagement with your target audiences through sponsored posts and pay-per-click promotions. Before you do this, you’ll want to select your audience criteria carefully forecast the results. Your forecast justifies the investment and gives you something concrete to monitor and optimize against. Not a good option for the inexperienced. Consider:
- Sponsored Content, or media-rich ads that appear in targeted users’ LinkedIn feeds,
- Sponsored Messaging, those ads that appear in targeted audience’s LinkedIn inbox,
- Dynamic Ads to deliver personalized ads at scale to users identified by company name or job title, or
- Text ads for self-service, pay-per-click ads that are quick to set up.
5. Analyze and Adjust Along the Way.
- Keep an eye on your account’s metrics – engagement, followers, posts, clicks. LinkedIn Analytics can help you track the performance of your posts, ads, and overall page engagement.
- Be nimble and course correct as needed, based on data. Adjustments can come in the form of content, targeting, and engagement strategies aimed at improving reach and overall effectiveness.
Is LinkedIn going to overtake TikTok? Nope. It is another type of marketing tactic with a clear business-minded audience. Do share this post with your digital marketing team and be in touch. We love talking all things social. info@intead.com.
