Social Media: 2018 Trends & predictions for 2019
Posted on January 22, 2019 by Gary O'Connor
As we are in the early weeks of 2019, I wanted to write about the social media opinions colleges and universities from across the world wrote about from their experience in 2018. TerminalFour released their Higher Education Digital Marketing & Web Survey a few weeks prior to the Christmas break.
This was the 5th annual survey TerminalFour have published which represents opinions, insights & perceptions of over 400 higher education leaders in marketing, web and student recruitment. This survey received responses from more countries than ever before including Colombia, Nigeria, South Africa & Switzerland to name a few new countries. A total of 383 universities took part in the survey and below is a summary of the findings which makes for a very interesting read:
Conversions 2018
Facebook is still considered the most popular social media platform when it comes to conversions for University and Colleges websites. However, this has fallen 12.3% in the last year (currently 64.2%).
Instagram is continuing to grow and has risen from 2.4% in 2016 to 8.4% in 2018. YouTube has also seen some growth when it comes to conversions . It has risen from 2.9% in 2016 to 4.7% in 2018.
Snapchat have failed to capture the respondent’s interest when it comes to conversion, with a mere 1.3% claiming Snapchat is the platform where they receive the most conversions
Awareness/Engagement 2018
Once again Facebook tops the list for social media platforms that received the most interactions form prospective students. This has risen 19.7% since 2016. 64.7% of respondents claimed Facebook far and way takes the crown here with next biggest share being Instagram on 17.3%.
Instagram has fallen 19% since 2016Â when receiving interaction form these campaigns, Twitter has risen by over 8% with Snapchat falling by 1.8% since 2017
2019 Social Media
So where do Universities and Colleges believe these social media platforms will be by the end of in terms of conversion and awareness in 2019? What social media platforms will they invest in the most over the next 12 months?
Surprise surprise! Facebook and Instagram are predicted to continue their dominance regarding social media campaigns. Interestingly though these stats show that Universities and Colleges believe Instagram will almost be on par with Facebook over the next 12 months.
35.5% on respondents claim they will invest most on Facebook and that is followed by a close 2nd for Instagram where 32.1% claim they will give the majority of their attention to this platform. Behind these platforms lies YouTube on 8.2% (which was 2.3% in 2017) where Universities are expecting video to have a much bigger role when interacting with prospective students, followed by Twitter (7%), LinkedIn (4.5%) & Snapchat (3.7%)
It was fascinating to review this survey and I look forward to seeing how these trends play out during the year. If you are planning student recruitment campaigns and are looking for some assistance to reach your objectives feel free to get in touch info@educate-direct.com