Using User-Generated Content for Higher Ed Communities

Serving as an ultimate endorsement of your higher ed brand, user-generated convinces more prospective students to enroll at your school. Inserted at the right time into their higher ed journey, this content provides authentic first-hand information to help prospective students understand who goes to your school, what they can expect, and, ultimately, what it’s actually like to be a student at your school.

How do we know this? Because our data shows that students listen to other students. They want their advice and trust their opinions. 

But how do you source the right user-generated content for your higher ed brand? How do you ensure the right student audiences find it? And how do you leverage this content to help support higher ed communities? 

Here are some quick points to consider to create, distribute, and use user-generated content for your higher ed community of students:

Know what content your student community wants

Although academic programming is at the core of what every school offers, there is simply so much more which makes your school special. Maybe it’s the unique architecture or geographical location of your campus. Maybe it’s your amazing school spirit or sports teams. Or maybe it’s the talented, fun people who make your higher ed institution the place to be – and study. 

Having an idea of what students want to know about your school, academics aside, can help your team come up with lists of tentative topics or themes. Although students may or may not use your topics or themes as hard-topics, these creative prompts can help point them in the right direction. 

Finding topics or themes can be as simple as seeing what students are talking about with student ambassadors. Be sure to gather as many conversational insights as possible related to the questions prospective students ask. Resulting topics and themes can range, from where to get the best grub near campus to which libraries are the best to study at and why. As a rule, user-generated content should be able to develop organically, should be light, and should be authentic. 

Here are some fun examples of student-generated content to help get you started. 

Know what content formats your student community expects

Successful user-generated content is as about format and distribution as it is the content itself. If content is not formatted according to how your student audience wants to consume it (not mobile optimized, for example), then users will either drop off and look elsewhere for information related to the questions they ask, or, worse, might not even see your user-generated content all together. Before publishing content to your website, student app, or other channels, be sure you understand how students expect to engage with what you post. 

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Look for platforms or solutions which are optimized for the content user experience to spur better engagement. In addition to support for formats other than text, be sure your student ambassador content creators can freely upload images or video directly from a mobile device. Once published, the user experience needs to be light, filterable, and match other search experiences your student audience expects elsewhere on the web. The key here is that, in order to maximize effectiveness of user-generated content, students should be able to discover what you publish easily and interact with it naturally. 

Know which student voices fit with your higher ed brand

Akin to knowing what kind of content your student community wants, you should determine who they wish to hear it from. While Unibuddy data tells us that 92% of your prospective student audience say listening to a current student helps them make a decision whether to attend your school, you need to ensure they are getting information from the right student.

You might, for example, have a community of international students from a specific geographical area who are interested in attending your engineering program. In order to engage further with this audience, you might connect them to content produced by a current engineering student ambassador who originates from their area. In addition to showing this audience that you understand what they are looking for, you can provide authentic first-person evidence that what you claim is legit. 

By filtering by country of origin and program, you can browse conversational insights to see what exactly a specific cohort of prospective students are asking – and what they are needing – to make a decision about your school. User-generated content, produced by the right student authors, for this cohort, is an excellent passive way to get the conversation started. 

Learn more about how to encourage user-generated student ambassador content.

Share user-generated content with the right channels 

For maximum exposure, ensure you’re distributing user-generated content across the right channels. While organic search traffic, through search engine optimization, can help bring in some of your readers, don’t forget about your earned audiences of students – whether through social media pages or via hub-style groups like in Unibuddy Community. 

In addition to helping you build credibility within these groups, sharing related user-generated content, created by and for a specific higher ed community, can help make connections between prospective students and student ambassadors. Whether they want to hear more from a student author on a specific topic, or just like their “vibe,” pushing user-generated content to student groups helps facilitate movement through your higher ed funnel. 

In tandem with social shares to your higher ed community, be sure to also ensure user-generated content is made available on your website. Serving as candid, fun content next to your core web copy, user-generated content can help your brand break a sort of “fifth wall” of higher ed formality which so often characterizes our industry. And, seeing as a full 10% of prospective students leave your website if they don’t feel immediate “good vibes,” the stakes couldn’t be higher.   

Learn more about how Unibuddy can help you leverage user-generated content for your higher ed community.