Paying to Play: White Paper Focuses on Ways Education Adapts to Succeed in Social Media

The best and most well-adapted social media managers embrace change.

One of the biggest challenges for everyone is keeping tabs on the constantly evolving social media landscape and making decisions about what to do and when in response to this ever-evolving environment.

Paying to Play: Social Media in Advancement 2016

It’s fitting that our new white paper, which offers an in-depth view of the findings from the 2016 Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE)-Huron-mStoner Survey of Social Media in Advancement, carries the title, “Paying to Play: Social Media in Advancement 2016.” In it, we provide a deeper look at what boosting or advertising social media posts means, and how some institutions use it as a strategic tool to advance various kinds of campaigns.

It used to be important to adopt a variety of tactics to boost the organic reach of posts on Facebook — meaning that posts would reach a significant number of fans, who would share the posts with their own networks. But that’s changed as Facebook’s algorithms (and some would say greed) have evolved. As organic reach has dropped, it’s become essential to boost posts or use Facebook’s advertising tools to achieve reach for individual posts and success for your campaigns.

So it’s not surprising that 83 percent of education institutions who responded to the Survey of Social Media in Advancement are boosting or advertising on Facebook, and some are using similar tactics to promote tweets and LinkedIn posts. Not that these tactics are widespread yet. But paying to play is increasingly a prerequisite for success on social media.

Social media’s role in fundraising

While paid social media advertising was a primary theme of our research this year, we also continued to ask about the role of social media in fundraising, especially with regard to giving days and crowdfunding. (A giving day is a 24-hour fundraising event in which staff, volunteers, and donors attempt to raise money. Crowdfunding is Kickstarter-style fundraising, often used in education to raise smaller amounts of money for a specific purpose.)

In 2016, 46 percent of respondents reported that their institutions had run a giving day, up from 42 percent in 2015, and 10 percent of institutions reported raising more than $1 million from it.

After you download the white paper, I invite you to come back to this post and share your biggest takeaways and thoughts. Did anything surprise you? How is your institution adapting its social media strategy to respond to the ever-changing algorithms of Facebook and other social networks?