Social media has been part of community colleges’ communications strategies for 15 or 20 years. But whether they’re trying to reach prospective students or stay in touch with current matriculants, the rapidly changing nature of these media — driven by new channels and changing tastes — requires marketing communications executives and their staff to stay nimble.
One case is NorthWest Arkansas Community College (NWACC) in Bentonville, which recently launched a rebranding effort with social media front-and-center as part of its work. Others include Las Positas College in Livermore, California, which has been focused on telling authentic student stories since marketing efforts have been pushed down from the district level; and Skagit Valley College in northwest Washington state, which has invested recently in TikTok, combining serious and silly content, and earning national recognition for its efforts.
The Brand at NWACC
At the outset, the NWACC effort launched into market research to determine what the rebrand should encompass. To do so, the college used social media to both raise awareness and push out a survey to students, faculty, staff and community members through various channels to gain insights and preferences. About 2,000 responded, which the survey consultants whom NWACC hired said was a strong result, according to Aaron Messer, digital marketing specialist.
This article comes from the current issue of the Community College Journal, the flagship publication of the American Association of Community Colleges.
As the date for the relaunch approached, the college kept it quiet until about two weeks beforehand and then “lit a match again,” Messer says. “We put a post out and ended up dropping short-form video content on the day of the rollout, pushing the new branding. With that, we transitioned most of our main accounts to the new branding right away.” The department-by-department transition soon followed, he says.
Although the look and feel of the social media channels has not radically changed as a result of the rebranding, NWACC has made “tweaks” to which channels it uses and how, based on the survey feedback, leaning more into short-form video content than it has in the past, Messer says.
“We got a lot of good feedback, and we’re using different channels to target people differently,” he says. “As we continue to grow the department, we are focused on getting more short-form video content out. … For the ads, one of the videos we used was a testimonial of a first-generation parent, still fairly young, just being able to draw in a lot of people who have the possibility to relate to her. That’s what we are going for: someone being able to picture themselves in that student’s shoes.”
To micro-target messages to different audiences, NWACC uses Facebook primarily for parents, a combination of Facebook and Instagram for older “nontraditional” students, Instagram and TikTok for college-age students, and LinkedIn for alumni, Messer says.
For both cohorts of students, “Instagram is easily the biggest, based on the metrics I’m seeing daily, weekly, monthly,” he says. “Copy-wise, it’s mostly going to be the same.”
Regarding alumni on LinkedIn, he adds, “People want to know what’s happenings at the schools they went to. There are a lot of community members on LinkedIn. Anytime there’s community events, or community classes, that gets pushed out on there.”
NWACC uses paid media to reach prospective students — using a combination of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube — resuming its campaigning in mid-summer, after a short pause as the rebranding was salted into place, to prompt enrollment before the fall semester started Messer says. “And then to keep them engaged, we try to post consistently,” he says. “We have a lot of things going on in the college. During the school year, we post pretty much daily. There’s a lot of content that can be pushed out organically.”
While TikTok is officially banned on state-owned devices and computers in Arkansas, educational institutions are not covered by that prohibition, and NWACC had an additional “in” given that its chief of staff and executive director of communications, Grant Hodges, is also a state representative, Messer notes.
“We called the governor’s office and got verbal approval to use it,” he says, adding that in any case, all community colleges, because they’re educational, are opted out. “We are definitely trying to post more and more on it. We had a position that had been open for a while for a videographer. Now that that’s full, we’re trying to push out more [TikTok] content.”
Local authenticity at Las Positas
At Las Positas, all marketing had been handled by the Chabot Las Positas Community College District until a couple years ago, when new positions were created both at Chabot Community College and Las Positas, says Chip Woerner, director of marketing at the latter.
“We have a concentrated team of one, at the moment,” he says. “What we’ve done is gotten the students involved. We’ve formed focus groups, gotten them together and had them review previous content. They’ve suggested new approaches and talked about different channels.”
The overall focus has been centered around “up-leveling” the quality and frequency of the social media content, from what had been mostly focused on static flyers posted on an ad-hoc basis, Woerner says. “Now, we have a social marketing calendar, and we mix up our types of content, making it much more dynamic with a lot more video, and a lot more content that features students and is student-produced,” he says. “We’ve increased our audience size and engagement levels [by about 2½ times]. But we’re at the early stages.”
While attending higher-education marketing-related conferences, Woerner has learned that other colleges have dedicated social media teams, with a separate person on each platform, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. “They’re much further ahead than we are,” he says. “This year, we’re making a concentrated effort to increase our audience further.”
Las Positas has focused on Instagram first and foremost, Facebook a decent amount and LinkedIn just a bit, and more for community outreach, Woerner says, adding that the college hasn’t created a TikTok but that it’s fully legal in California. Las Positas promotes its social channels to current students during various events on campus, as well as to prospective students during tours and open-house events.
Primarily, Las Positas has worked to tell authentic stories of students, Woerner says. “It’s having students talk about their experiences,” he says. “We’ve seen engagement levels five times higher than if we have somebody else from the college singing its praises and saying, ‘We have great programs.’ If a student says, ‘I absolutely love my anthropology instructor for these reasons, it’s the best class I’ve ever taken,’ we get much higher engagement levels.”
Woerner and his cadre of students have created a series called, “Tour LPC With Me,” in which students walk around campus and talk about new and existing buildings, including where they like to study, play or eat the most. “We’ve seen super-high engagement on that series,” he says. “We will still occasionally post a flyer. But whenever we can, we want to post video content and feature students in that content.”
The students who have gotten involved are mostly volunteers, some of them helping to promote their own groups on campus, although work-study students are also part of the mix, Woerner says.
“At the student life center, there’s a student who’s very social-media savvy; she does a work-study program with that facility,” he says. “Occasionally she will lend her help. It’s mainly volunteer students who just have an interest. Student government is very active and very helpful in terms of generating content. I will reach out to student government and say, ‘I would love to highlight a student resource fair coming up. Can you produce a 30- to 45-second video?’ And not provide a script—just have them do it naturally, organically.”
After such spots run, Woerner will circle back to his focus groups to gather students together and review content. “What did you find engaging? What missed the mark?” he says. “We get some really useful information from those sessions.”
