An effective higher education social media strategy must appeal to a variety of audiences: current students, prospective students, alumni, staff, donors, fans, family, etc. Each of these communities is unique, but all contribute to a common college experience.
Meeting the needs and interests of diverse audiences requires a combination of data, collaboration, and customized messaging. Thankfully, each of these efforts supports the other—at least, that's what the social team at Gettysburg College discovered after testing and learning.
Kailey White, Assistant Director of Social Media & Digital Strategy, and Staci Grimes, Director of Digital Marketing, are the driving forces behind Gettysburg College’s social media strategy. Together, they’ve transformed the digital space into an online community that helps key audiences deepen their engagement and support of the college.
We spoke with Grimes and White to get the inside scoop on what it takes to develop an impactful social media strategy for higher education institutions. Read on for their top tips and a behind-the-scenes look at their student internship program.
The Benefits of a Social Media Strategy in Higher Education
Social media offers something that brochures and campus tours can't: an opportunity to join the broader conversation about your school's brand and reputation.
Over the past two years, Grimes and White have worked together to consolidate relevant spaces and build new ones to grow the college's online presence and foster meaningful engagement with key audiences. Here are some of the benefits Gettysburg College is seeing from these efforts:
Build community and support
Gettysburg College’s social media strategy was successful in helping audiences find meaning in the college’s vision.
“Community building is central to what we do, especially in organic social media,” Grimes says. “We're always looking for opportunities to create digital spaces with different types of content that members of our community can engage with.”
The end goal is to guide prospective students who are engaged online through the admissions cycle to enroll. Other audiences – current students, parents, alumni and fans – are guided through the philanthropy funnel, encouraging them to volunteer more, attend more events and give more at higher levels, while simultaneously increasing pride for their university.
Reinforce your message
At Gettysburg, students receive an “education that matters” — an experiential approach to learning that motivates students to “do great things” — which is the college's promise and also a key messaging pillar used throughout its marketing materials.
According to Grimes, seeing students embrace and accept this messaging is one of the most important impacts of the university's social strategy: “It's incredibly rewarding to see our audience using our brand language in conversations about the university and within their own networks. It shows they're embracing the mission, resonating with it and developing a sense of belonging.”
Support recruitment
After 2025, the United States is on track to experience a decline in high school graduates, a phenomenon known as the “enrollment cliff.” This demographic shift will create an increasingly competitive recruiting environment, making every interaction with prospective students more important than ever.
Social media's influence is on the rise: According to a Q1 2024 Sprout Social Pulse survey, 78% of consumers agree that a brand's social media presence has a greater impact on how much they trust the brand than it did a year ago. This number rises to 88% among younger generations, making social media a key channel for connecting with and recruiting future students.
Universities and colleges with a consistent, audience-driven social presence are in a better position to build trust, showcase their unique value, and attract more students.
5 Higher Education Social Media Tips from Gettysburg College
University marketing teams manage many different elements of their strategy, including departmental and program goals, audience needs, and a comprehensive marketing plan. The following tips can help you balance these elements to create a cohesive, value-driven higher education social media strategy.
1. Create a network-specific social media strategy
Gettysburg College's largest audience is its current student body, and while they are an important audience, if you create your social content with only traditional college students in mind, you'll miss out on the opportunity to engage with other important groups, like parents and alumni.
“Understanding your audience and their preferences allows you to deliver a more personalized experience across channels,” White says. “For example, TikTok attracts a younger demographic and requires a different content strategy than Facebook, where parents and families are the primary audience.”
Sprout's network-specific social media reporting options help White stay up to date on each profile's unique audience. “Our strategy truly recognizes the different needs of our various stakeholders, and we owe our insight into those audiences to Sprout.”
2. Link your marketing goals to your university’s vision
If you want to create an effective higher education social media strategy, it’s not enough to just pursue engagement for engagement’s sake: Your plan must be aligned with your institution’s future goals.
Gettysburg College’s social team supports the university’s strategic vision by enhancing the university’s reputation and expanding its reach, as well as fostering an environment that enhances recruitment and philanthropy.
“Each year, our office uses an integrated marketing plan that maps directly to the strategic direction of the university,” Grimes explains. “We’ve identified key metrics that allow us to understand if our work is effective, so we can be confident that the work we’re doing is advancing the vision of the university.”
3. Actively share social media performance data
Grimes and White attend every planning meeting armed with relevant social insights, regardless of who they are meeting with. This practice fosters collaboration with various organizations on campus and improves the overall effectiveness of the strategy.
“We're collecting hard data to be as strategic as possible when consulting with different departments and programs,” Grimes says. “Our focus on performance and audience insights is influencing the cadence and delivery of messaging across the organization.”
White shares the reports monthly with Gettysburg's content team so they can incorporate social insights into their future work, and Grimes provides social KPI analysis for a report that Jamie Yates, the school's Chief Communications and Marketing Officer, presents to the school's board of trustees several times a year to show the impact of strategy. While these reports have different goals and audiences, there is a single source of truth: Sprout Social.
“One of the things we really love about Sprout is that all of our major brand accounts are linked into the Sprout dashboard,” Grimes says. “We can aggregate insights and see everything through the same lens.”
4. Collaborate with campus partners
As the university's social media presence grows and evolves, more programs are interested in getting involved. “We're definitely seeing more campus partners participating in the social media space,” White says. “Libraries, dining services departments, various academic programs — they're all actively participating and relying on us to help them find areas where they can improve.”
Grimes and White have worked together to meet these demands by educating campus partners on how to use social media. They created and shared presentations on how to represent Gettysburg’s brand on social media and how to strategically develop social media and increase student engagement.
These efforts will create new opportunities to showcase the value of social media with strategic partners, so the University can continue to strengthen its online presence and strengthen the connections of its campus community.
5. Use social listening to lead the conversation
According to Grimes, social listening is essential to keeping Gettysburg College’s social media strategy audience-centric: “We use listening tools to evaluate the timing of various campaigns, gauge positive mentions of the college in the digital space, and evaluate our efforts against industry benchmarks.”
It also plays a key role in crisis management: When an issue is unfolding locally, nationally, or globally, the Gettysburg team uses listening to decide whether to pause scheduled posts or craft messaging around the issue. The tool provides an overview of the conversation and valuable sentiment analysis data to get a clearer understanding of audience opinions.
“Sometimes when we're in the comments section and reading the conversations, an issue feels very salient to us. Then we look at the listening data and see that the impact of the conversations is pretty limited. This helps us understand, from a really practical standpoint, what's actually going on and whether we need to take measures or resume normal business operations.”
-Stacey Grimes, Director of Digital Marketing, Gettysburg College
How Gettysburg College Uses Sprout Social to Manage its Student Internship Program
The tips outlined above will help you refine your strategy, but you can’t refine it without content. At Gettysburg, students not only appear in social media posts, but they are also involved in planning and creating the posts.
Gettysburg College's marketing office hires about a dozen interns each year. The interns' roles mimic those of professional staff at the college, including copywriting, video production, photography and graphic design.
This is not your ordinary internship: students will receive exclusive training and networking opportunities with previous interns, as well as the chance to collaborate on professional-level content production.
“Each year, students lend their talents to support high-profile events held at the college,” White explains. “For the past two years, Gettysburg College and community partners have hosted Ken Burns at the Gettysburg Film Festival, and interns from our office are heavily involved in executing coverage strategies for these events.”
White creates individualized social media reports for each student using Sprout Social's tagging feature, which allows users to label content for more customized reporting options.
“We create specific tags for each of our student interns,” White says. “That way, we can create reports that are unique to them by filtering the reports by their name tag. We can also drill down into their specific areas of expertise. For example, if they specialize in photography, we can filter the reports by their name and content type tag.”
These reports not only highlight their accomplishments but also help them stand out in a competitive job market. “The festival's first-year lead intern talked about her experience during a job interview, and the interviewer called our program director and told her how impressed she was,” White says. “She ended up getting the position, which was fantastic.”
Gettysburg’s Marketing Internship Program provides mutual benefits to both the social media team and participating students: Students gain real-world work experience, while their contributions generate relevant, authentic content that increases engagement with key audiences.
Build a smarter higher education social media strategy with Sprout Social
When universities invest in a social media strategy, they do more than establish new channels of communication: they foster a sense of community and build connections with students, alumni, fans, and more.
Want to see how other universities are using social media analytics tools to improve their strategy? See how Texas A&M University used Sprout to drive 8.3 million content impressions in six months.
