Launching the Students at Manchester Facebook page

08 Oct 2018

How the Student Communications and Marketing Team rebranded the page – and why

The Student Communications and Marketing Team has rebranded its Students at Manchester Facebook account.

When the team reviewed social channels, testing performance against audience demographics, the data indicated that prospective students – both those holding offers to study and those earlier in the recruitment lifecycle – were more likely to follow official University channels rather than those dedicated to recruitment marketing and conversion messaging, such as University of Manchester Admissions.

The team’s weekly newsletter achieves far above HE industry standard open and click through rates and last year students were exposed to more than 14 million views of our content in the My Manchester portal. But the only social channel it ran specifically for students was Twitter – an audit showed it was mostly reaching staff, other departments, companies and researchers.

Student Communications and Marketing Manager Jennifer Boden said: “Working with the Social Media Leadership Team (SMLT) we repositioned an existing channel towards a new audience, and Students at Manchester was born. There’s more video, viewable with or without sound, and shorter, more concise content. Attention spans are short and students are bombarded with messaging on a daily basis, so we want to provide informative, entertaining material in a more engaging format, with a voice more informal in tone.

“For prospective students, we are working closely with the central social media team to create a calendar of content and campaigns.”

The outputs have included this film, discussing British stereotypes:

The team has seen:

• An increase in following by more 1,000 followers
• More than 13,500 video views
• Engagements double to reach 50,000 more people with our content compared to the previous month. 

They have also developed content for returning undergraduates, PGTs, PGRs and plan to scope the requirements of distance learners; will widely promote peer-to-peer content generated by student content ambassadors to share as advocacy marketing where appropriate; and undertake more paid-for advertising over the year, choosing key campaigns to highlight for targeted audiences.