Engaging your target audience
But how do you engage this target audience? How do you ensure the content you share is interesting for them, but also contributes to our goal of "the right student in the right place"? A challenge we've struggled with since the beginning. We had an Instagram account , managed alternately by interns and colleagues from the communications department, but what email data were we actually showing there? We reposted beautiful photos of campus, shared photos of striking bicycles we saw on campus ( #bicyclefriday ), posted photos of students, a lecture hall, an event, and so on. But who, and more importantly, what were we actually reaching with all this? Our followers were mostly our own students, there was little interaction, and so you could wonder what we were actually doing it for. Certainly not for student recruitment, which was actually the intention.
With all these doubts in mind
we decided to completely overhaul our approach in the summer of 2017. How could we use our account to reach the right target audience—in our case, (international) prospective students? And with content that offered something extra, content that contributed to our recruitment goals?
The answer turned out to be much simpler than we could have imagined. For many prospective students, the atmosphere at a university plays a significant role in their choice of further education. But it's also one of the most difficult aspects of a university to experience, especially if distance prevents you from visiting.