INTRODUCTION
Effective higher education marketing requires a well-thought-out social media presence, including on LinkedIn. To make sure your institution stands out, optimize the platform’s features to achieve your goals, whether that’s to increase enrollment or build relationships with prospective students, current students, staff and alumni.
Here are tips on LinkedIn marketing for higher education institutions.
WHAT TO POST ON YOUR COMPANY PAGE
While LinkedIn Company Pages are typically used for HR purposes, they also fall into the realm of marketing. Use yours to show off what’s going on in your institution–namely, awards/recognition, media coverage, publications, events and announcements. Make sure to tag any staff, faculty, students and/or alumni that are featured in your posts.
To maintain engagement with your followers, try to post at least 2-3 times a week. Try posting at different times to see when engagement is the highest.
HOW TO USE LINKEDIN ADS
Did you know that, in 2020, more than 660 million users were reached through LinkedIn ads? Using LinkedIn ads can expand your reach and promote your higher ed institution to the right people, such as prospective graduate students. The platform’s campaign manager features a variety of ad objectives (e.g. website visits, lead generation) and business-focused targeting parameters you can use to reach new students/faculty. You can target by location, industry, member skills, etc.
You can also select the format that matches your objectives. For example, use event ads if you want to promote an upcoming job fair. It’s best to A/B test ads (e.g. create multiple versions of ads) to test language and visuals. That will help you in your future advertising efforts.
Once you’ve set your objective, you will build your audience, set an ad budget (minimum is $10/day), and upload your creative (e.g. graphic or video). During this stage, it’s important to add conversion tracking to your LinkedIn ads to identify which leads came from which campaign.
PARTICIPATE IN GROUPS
LinkedIn Groups provide professionals in similar industries a place to share experiences, ask for help and build connections. One way to use Groups is by having your faculty participate in academic discussions and share their research to promote their expertise.
You also can create your own LinkedIn Groups, such as one for your institution’s alumni. Groups can either be public or private. If the latter, write a brief summary about the group and include the types of content and conversations that are typically shared, as well as any requirements for joining. For example, “This is a networking group for alumni of University of Wisconsin – Madison. Please list UW-Madison in your educational profile. Once verified, we will add you to the group. Please note we don’t encourage soliciting, etc.”