Higher Education

How the University of Sydney Proves the Value of Social Media

Before Hootsuite, there was a lot of inconsistency across the university’s social media channels. The central team had no visibility into how the faculties were managing content or measuring its success.

The social media team had a vision for what they wanted to achieve and what success looked like—but they needed better alignment across the university to bring that vision to life.

With Hootsuite, the team has greater insight into what’s happening and can measure the individual and combined success of the Social Squad.

The Social Squad meets weekly to discuss upcoming content, determine its strategic importance, and decide which channels to share it on to ensure it reaches the right audience. They also collaborate on best practices, test different ways of working, align on content, and track their progress.

The University of Sydney’s website is built, managed, and measured through Adobe Experience Manager. The preconfigured Hootsuite integration with Adobe enables the university to track the impact of social media across the entire student journey.

Using built-in tracking codes, the school can measure engagement from the first time an individual engages on social media to when they become a prospective student on the website.

This end-to-end visibility into the student journey enables the social media team to measure and prove the return on investment in social media.

The University of Sydney uses Talkwalker and Hootsuite to understand people’s perceptions of the brand in various online channels. Sentiment tracking has transformed the university’s ability to measure and manage its brand reputation.

By monitoring brand sentiment scores and engaging in social listening, the social media team gains helpful insights to inform campaign strategy. It can then take proactive steps to boost sentiment through social media communications as needed.

For example, during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the team noticed negative sentiment around travel in Australia among international audiences. Following a thoughtful campaign called Stay Strong India, the team saw an incredible 30% increase in net sentiment score.

In the past, the social team found it difficult to report on its progress in a meaningful way. There was so much content being shared across so many channels, it was hard to keep track of it all.

With the help of Hootsuite’s Business Value and Customer Success teams, the University of Sydney set benchmarks against other higher education institutions. The University can now demonstrate how it tracks higher than both industry and average platform benchmarks, mainly because it has a great understanding of its audiences.

With Hootsuite Advanced Analytics, the team can also clearly report on everything from engagement to campaign performance and return on investment without spending days or weeks analyzing data in spreadsheets.

The University of Sydney is less than one year into its new social media strategy, and it is already using social media and tracking its performance in a way that raises the university to an entirely new level of social media best practice.

The team plans to continue executing its effective strategy, gathering more insights on student and academic audiences, and recruiting more influencers to help it continue to grow its social media presence and achieve its ambitious goals.