Why social media marketers in higher ed need a community
Kasandrea kicks things off by highlighting a common misstep: many cool campus events go unnoticed due to poor communication strategies. Shiro points out that a centralized event calendar could be a game-changer for distributing information effectively.
Kasandrea strongly advises against using Instagram merely to post event flyers. Instead, social media should evoke experiences and create FOMO to engage students. She recommends informing students about events at least two weeks in advance to help them plan accordingly. Engaging educational content is also vital; featuring knowledgeable faculty on social media can spark interest and drive engagement.
The conversation also touches upon the intersection of attraction and enrollment strategies. Connecting like-minded individuals online not only builds community but can also serve as a powerful enrollment tool by showcasing the institution’s unique faculty and resources. Kasandrea and Shiro emphasize creating content from events and sharing key takeaways to keep the excitement going long after the event ends.
Another highlight is the “This is Purdue” podcast, an example of how showcasing faculty and campus highlights can enhance community engagement. Speaking of community, Kasandrea invites listeners to join the Higher Ed Social community, especially vibrant on Facebook. The group, which she started, is a vital support system for higher ed marketers, offering resources, trend forecasting, and technical help.
Kasandrea also discusses the unrealistic expectations placed on first-generation college students to navigate complex educational systems with little support. She advocates for more user-friendly technology integration, akin to what retail and finance industries employ. The goal is to reduce cumbersome, labor-intensive processes and increase efficiency.
Recognizing the mental health challenges social media professionals face, Kasandrea underscores the need for professional recognition and fair compensation. Misconceptions about the role being suitable for young interns often lead to undervaluation. Meanwhile, the Higher Ed Social community provides a supportive space for isolated marketers to share experiences and best practices.
Don’t miss out on this insightful episode that dives deep into the nuances and strategies for improving event communication and leveraging social media in higher education!
Read the transcription
Shiro [00:00:15]:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast hosted by Concept 3 d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, and Google. My name is Shiro Torre, and I will be your host today. And I’m super excited to talk about forming a 13,000 person community for higher ed social marketers and why your social media account is not your campus calendar. So, I have an amazing guest to really talk about this today. I’ve been trying to track her down for a while, so I’m really excited to have Cassandra Sereno join us today. Cassandra, welcome to the show.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:00:53]:
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to get to chat. This is my favorite topic.
Shiro [00:00:57]:
Yep. I I love this too and, also, the the question I ask all my guests is please tell me what you love about higher ed.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:01:07]:
For me, I think it’s it’s an industry where we can like, not only are our students our outputs. Right? But we’re putting good work into the world. Right? We’re not just making widgets or tumblers or or something like that. We’re actually, making humans better and and unleashing them on the world to do great things. And so, I think that’s it’s special in an industry to to be able to see the impact of your work in a variety of different ways.
Shiro [00:01:37]:
Yeah. I love that. Making change. The podcast post I just posted today on my LinkedIn was with CU Boulder’s Engineering School. And we I talked to their new, like, head of marketing, which is a completely new role, and we got to talk about gender parity in engineering and how I think their 1st year, the the the percentage of women in their 1st year engineering classes up to 42%,
Kasandrea Sereno [00:02:00]:
and
Shiro [00:02:00]:
the national average is around, like, 15%. And that’s a goal they’ve accomplished over, like, decades. And so, like, yeah, making changes is so important, and it’s it’s amazing. Well well, great. Let’s jump in here to it. Can you tell us a little bit very briefly about your background, and what you do today?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:02:20]:
Yeah. So, I have been in higher ed for the majority of my career. Before college, I worked a lot in hospitality, so, working with guest interactions and how do you, serve, in sort of a hospitality role, restaurants, hotels, that sort of thing. In college, my undergraduate major was business management and industrial psychology. I like to people watch and understand the how and why people do things. Finished my undergrad, thought I was gonna work in HR. Tried that for 30 days and absolutely hated it. Pivoted back to go work at my alma mater in admissions.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:02:55]:
Loved it. Went on to do my master’s in education and college student affairs and career counseling. Graduated right into the recession of 0 8, which was wonderfully demoralizing, waiting tables with a master’s degree and trying to reassess my life choices. I really do love business, and so I went back and did my MBA, intending to pivot out to marketing at some point in my career, but that really just didn’t happen. And so for the past, oh gosh, 14 years, I’ve been on the student services side of higher ed. So after, working in admissions, I moved over to the academic advising side, and now my current role is as the dean of retention and engagement at Tulsa Community College where I oversee the TACoS offices. So testing, advising, careers, and orientation, sort of the backbone of student services. And so I love higher ed.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:03:43]:
I love working in higher ed, but I also really enjoy the corporate world and business and marketing, and social was kind of a natural fit for building community both online and in person. And so it’s been it’s been a really nontraditional ride, but it’s great.
Shiro [00:03:59]:
I I love the TACoS acronym. That’s it’s great. I had TACoS last evening too. Well, great. Can you tell us a little bit more about the community you’ve built, which is the higher ed social Facebook group? How it all started, and where it is today.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:04:13]:
Definitely. So I’ve been really interested in sort of social media management, since the very beginning. I’ve I’ve, was a beta user for Pinterest, got to meet some really cool people. My brother designs video games and user interface, and so he is really well connected in California. And so got the opportunity to kinda see these things as they were they were coming on board. Right? I was we I was one of the first folks to to get Facebook, right, when we first rolled out to colleges and thought that was really cool and, worked on that. And so back in 2015, I was in another social media managers group, one of the first training groups that were really out there for free people who were interested in doing social media as a serious job. And someone posted up and said, hey.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:04:56]:
I just took a job at a college, and it’s really weird here. I don’t understand the pace. I don’t understand, you know, how it’s so different from corporate. Does anybody else work for a college? And I raised my hand. I was like, I do. I’ve been working in colleges for, like, 10 years now at this point, so let’s chat. And a few other people chimed in, and I started a a separate little Facebook group just to put the 5, 6 of us together so we weren’t, you know, hogging, this other thread on this other other other Facebook group. And, it was really slow organic growth at first.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:05:25]:
I think after the 1st year, we probably had maybe a 100 or 200 people. Just really grassroots organic word-of-mouth traffic. Fast forward 2020 in COVID, we kind of exploded as folks really pivoted to the online space, and colleges really started the momentum of taking social very seriously as a way to get their word out and platforms that already existed. And in 2020, we pivoted to become a full actual legal entity. So we’re the 1st professional society for social media marketers, because this really is a brand new infant industry that we are we are building the plane as we’re flying it as it as it is. And so now we are in we have over 13,000 almost members. We’re in 80 countries. We have a huge map that shows all of our colleges and universities, and we’re every day just looking at how we’re telling our campus story.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:06:18]:
How are we telling the story of our faculty, of our students, of our missions, of our outputs? And it is really different from any sort of other marketing for any other company. If you’re selling magazines or shoes or cars, this is very different. And so I think the landscape of higher ed lends itself well to social and about inviting community and having conversations. And so it’s really great. Our Facebook group is booming. It’s a very tight knit community, and we welcome folks who just wanna come and learn from this space. And as we say, building the plane while we’re flying it. So
Shiro [00:06:54]:
Well and this is amazing. Like, 13,000 members. That’s insane. I mean, I was literally just in the group earlier, and I realized I’m in so many different Facebook groups. And first off, I was like, I need to leave a couple of these. But, man, very few of those communities even reached 13,000. I think it was actually one of the biggest communities I’m a part of. So, kudos to you there.
Shiro [00:07:15]:
It was there was there a moment in the last, what, almost decade now since you’ve launched that you were like, oh my gosh. This is, like, gonna be a thing. Like because you said it started out as, like, a couple members, right, like, as a private group. What was that what was that turning point for you?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:07:32]:
Oh my gosh. I think the first time I was at a conference and someone recognized me. Like, we were there. I wanna say it was at the Ruffalo Noel Levitz conference a couple years ago, and someone saw my name tag and they were like, oh my god, you’re the person from Higher Ed Social. And it was like a weird celebrity moment because that just doesn’t happen when you work in Higher Ed. Right? Like, nobody’s like, oh my god, there’s the dean. There’s there’s no fangirling that happens. And so that first time that someone recognized me, it was like, yeah.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:08:01]:
Okay. This is actually really cool, and and I’m really making an impact with these folks. I I really just started the group because I wanted to pivot out to that space. I wanted to make connections, network, and jump from my advising job out into marketing. And it just kinda never happened that way, but I get to play in that sandbox with all these really cool people. And so, yeah, that was probably my, oh my gosh. This is actually a really big thing, moment that happened a few years ago.
Shiro [00:08:28]:
That’s amazing. And and can you break down a little bit like, I’ll be surprised if you didn’t know about this group already, but let’s for the marketers who don’t, so, like, let’s say I’m a social media marketer, how does the community in the Facebook group help me out?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:08:42]:
Yeah. So what we found, especially going through COVID is a lot of times social media managers, don’t get a lot of training. They might get this as their other duties as assigned. So there’s a possibility that they are an academic or a student affairs professional first and someone said, here’s a Twitter account. You run it. Or here’s a Facebook group, or please start an Instagram for our department. And so they’re coming into it sideways. For our marketers who are coming from corporate, higher ed is a different beast.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:09:13]:
There’s different egos, there’s different timelines. We’re a 1000 year old economic model. We don’t operate like a lot of other industries. And so that can be a hard shift. And then also, social can be incredibly lonely, especially on a campus where everything we do is about connection. Right? If you’re a faculty member on a college campus, you have tons of other faculty you can go to lunch with. If you’re a small one person, 2 person marketing shop and you’re the only person handling social, you don’t get an outlet to talk to. Right? And so what we found is that that mental health and that community building space was incredibly important for these folks.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:09:50]:
And so we wanted higher ed social to be deeply organic and a place where you can come and say, you know, it’s a safe space. Right? Hey. I’m at a predominantly white institution. We’re seeing demonstrations during COVID and, a lot of, you know, hard things that are happening in the world and I don’t know how as the front front ambassador of the college. I’m struggling with how I’m doing this. How am I supposed to write content and be a mouthpiece for something when I’m struggling with it myself? And so we see a lot of that. We see a lot of technical help desking. So, hey.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:10:29]:
Instagram pushed out this rollout, and now my reels look funny. Has anybody else had this problem? Or help, we lost our Facebook group. Someone left. We can’t log in. Does someone have a contact? So we see a lot of that. And then also, knowledge sharing. Right? Hey. What’s working for your campus? Show us those funny reels.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:10:47]:
Show us those things that you’re working on. Because a lot of times in social, you might put hours into something and it totally flops, but you’re really proud of it. And so it helps other marketers to consume other colleges and universities. What’s going on out there? Right? And so we try to get ahead of trends. We wanna help forecast. Right? Is it is it cutesy? Is it demure? Right? Those posts are from last week. You can’t you can’t wait to ride those trends the way other corporations do. Right? Because your user base, your college students are at the absolute cutting edge of that.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:11:20]:
And so, yeah, it’s just a really happy place to come and meet friends who get it, who might be the only people on your campus who get it, but that who get the work that you do and the pride that you feel and and watching you build your accounts or create content for
Shiro [00:11:36]:
them. Yeah. I I I didn’t even think about the, the aspect of, like, how small the teams can be and how you just need someone to talk about. Like, I I didn’t really consider that. Like, yeah, that’s that’s gotta be a huge lift because I’m I work for a bigger marketing team now, but I usually often get hired in. I’m, like, 1 or the 1st or second higher ed or marketing person. Yep. And I need my Slack groups to basically, like, have people to talk to because I’m I go crazy.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:12:03]:
It really does, and we did, with there’s actually a really great mental health study that came out 2020, and then they re refreshed it in 2021 from University of West Virginia and Tony Dobie’s crew out there. And it was talking about not only is this a hard job to do because you don’t have necessarily a peer group, you’re leaning on your own expertise, but, also, social media and the Internet in general is an incredibly toxic place. Our members routinely get DMs that are vulgar, explicit, hateful. You know, it it is it is very common for someone to think it is socially acceptable to reach out to someone and say, hey. I hate the way you’re running this account. I think you should go kill yourself. Like, no other industry has that. Right? Like, nobody just walks into your office and says you’re doing an awful job.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:12:53]:
I think you should go unalive. Like, no. Like, this is not normal. This is not a thing that other industries have. And so, being able to have that outlet and and really the impact of mental health for folks who work on the Internet, has been a real big game changer since pivoting to becoming a society.
Shiro [00:13:09]:
Definitely. And and, also, another thought I had was while I think this is changing now with leader roles, coming in with social media experience, like, a lot of leadership positions who run marketing teams and own the social media function, like, they may not have experience. Like, sure. They they probably know what Facebook is, but when it comes to, like, account management on social channels, like, they probably have 0 experience. So as a social media individual contributor, like, you can’t ask your boss for Right. Exactly. Questions on what to do. Right?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:13:42]:
Exactly. And social media is really one of those you get a lot of armchair quarterbacks. Right? You get a lot of, you know, senior leadership that you know, your presidents, your vice presidents, they are of a different generation, and they use social media differently than your target audience. Right? Just because you have a Facebook account does not mean you know how to run a Facebook account for marketing. Right? I tell people every single person has a toilet in their house. It doesn’t make you a plumber just because you use it every day. It’s totally different. And so really being able to own that expertise is that is that social media professional coming in to say, I studied this.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:14:21]:
There are now graduate programs in this. I can get a master’s in doing this. And sometimes I’m gonna do things on our channels that you might not understand, but that is okay because you are not the target market. And I don’t know if a lot of other industries get that same pushback. I would imagine they probably do, especially when there’s layers of approval. So, yeah, I like the toilet algorithm, and then that usually gets them to be thinking, oh, yes. Also true. I definitely am out of my depth in this, and so leaning on your experts.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:14:53]:
And then for our marketers, how are you projecting that expertise? Are you confident in what you’re saying? And so the community really provides an outlet to be able to say, we have a peer group of community. I took this question to them. Here’s what a 100 other social media marketers across the country and outside of our country are saying on this topic. It is peer reviewed. And so in higher ed, that’s kind of the coin of the realm. Right? Faculty peer review and publish, student affairs side. We’re always benchmarking against other institutions. We call it the case method, copy and steal everything.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:15:26]:
And so this is an opportunity for social to have their own space to bounce ideas off of as well.
Shiro [00:15:33]:
Yeah. That’s amazing. If you haven’t joined already, please go and search, hashtag higher ed social on Facebook as a group. It should come up there. They also have a website, the higher ed social.org, which you can learn more about the the community and the group there. So go join if you haven’t already. It’s amazing. I I go in there, you know, every now and then just to see what people are talking about.
Shiro [00:15:56]:
And I I I found that, like, people don’t just post stuff about themselves. It’s a lot of question asking, and the amount of responses that come in just, like, one day or one hour is incredible. And so really I think it’s a really, really helpful community and one of the most active marketing communities I’ve seen in my 10 years.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:16:12]:
It really is. And it’s we don’t get a lot of self promotion. We get a lot of real authentic, honest conversations. We’ve also segmented the conversation a little bit because we know different areas have different utilizations. And so when you search hashtag Higher Ed Social in there, you’ll find us, but you’ll also find our sub communities. So we have one specifically for k twelve leaders, Right? Because it’s different when you’re working with with with minis and minors. Right? They’re the the laws are different. We have one for executive comms for our folks who are doing social media for c suite executives, deans and above vice presidents, chancellors, presidents, because they’re in a different space.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:16:50]:
Right? They’re probably not doing dance trends with their college president. That’s not really very common. We have a subgroup for marcoms, and so folks who are on the marketing and communication side of which social may be a piece, but their role is more holistic or global, and so we have a space for that as well. And so just as our members are needing to niche off and have these conversations, they’re able to find a peer group that is across time zone, across countries, across institution type. Right? Where we might wanna benchmark and talk to other 2 year schools or private schools or schools with athletic programs. And so, yeah, there’s a home for everybody no matter what their need is.
Shiro [00:17:30]:
That’s amazing. And I’d love to round things out with the the very high level question which is what’s your favorite part about the community you’ve built?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:17:39]:
Oh my gosh. My favorite part is probably being able to go across the country and travel and meet our members on their campus. So during COVID, I did 2 cross country road trips. The 1st summer, I did Tampa to Bangor, Maine to Milwaukee and just noodled up the coast meeting with our members and visiting their campuses. And then the 2nd year, I did Tampa to Fargo out to Seattle down to San Diego and back, and so I got to visit 100 of our college member institutions and see what makes their campus special. And so I think that is a really cool thing to be able to do, and I can post up and say, hey, guys. I’m gonna be in Chicago in September. Who’s out there? Can we go and meet and have coffee and and get to meet these friends that I’ve been talking to for years who we’ve never actually met in person? So I think that’s probably the coolest part.
Shiro [00:18:25]:
That sounds fun. I wanna do that
Kasandrea Sereno [00:18:27]:
too. Well, let’s come on out. Like, we we do IRL meetups all the time. That’s great. Sometimes it’s me hosting it because I’m coming to town. Sometimes it’s just members. We have we have a lot of members in the city concentrations, for example. I think we’ve got probably 2 or 300 in just Boston.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:18:42]:
And so, you know, let’s have an IRL meet up. Let’s go to coffee. Let’s go to lunch. Let’s go to a happy hour. And so the community is just as awesome in person as it is online.
Shiro [00:18:51]:
That’s great. And I I just wanted to circle back on one point earlier about, like, understanding that this is a very difficult position, like, going back to, like, the hateful comments that people are willing to leave on social channel because it’s social media. Apparently, it’s okay. Yep. You know, this is a very tough job and something I’ve recently launched is a higher ed salary higher ed marketing salary report. Yes. And I’m just asking the higher ed marketing community, specifically social here right now, to please go out and and submit a survey about your salary. I’m gonna create a full blown report.
Shiro [00:19:24]:
I wanna create this as an annual report, to help support the higher ed marketer and the social media marketer, to just create better transparency around wages and compensation, which typically uplifts the industry as a whole. So, I’ll have the link to the the forum in the podcast notes and LinkedIn post as well.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:19:43]:
We really do. It and it’s it’s one of those industries because everybody thinks it’s just for young people. Right? Oh, I can just get an intern to run our Twitter account. I can just get an intern. You know, let me just get a student worker and, you know, maybe give them some college credit, and they can run our Instagram. No. No, friends. This is the mouthpiece of your brand.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:20:01]:
You if you wouldn’t hire a 12 year old to run and be your chief executive marketing officer, we you don’t want them to be your mouthpiece to the world. And and so, we do find that a lot. What whatever we can do to help build the professionalism around our industry, happy to help.
Shiro [00:20:18]:
Oh, man. I let let me say one sentence on this because I I’ve spoken to a lot of VP level marketing folks, right, or enrollment or admissions folks, which, plays a hand with marketing, but they’re not usually responsible directly for Marcoms. But I asked them, like, how do you combat the enrollment cliff if you have that? And a lot of them say, like, they’ll avoid the elephant in the room, which is the pricing. Right? And so they won’t say that, but they’ll say, hey. Like, you know, we gotta we gotta work on our messaging. We gotta invest more in marketing because they basically, like
Kasandrea Sereno [00:20:52]:
Yep.
Shiro [00:20:52]:
They’re they’re kinda looking at marketing teams often to to pick up not the slack, but to pick up the pace in increasing enrollment. And so, like, I I I think the salaries and compensation should be reflective of what schools are banking on to help.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:21:08]:
It’s so true. And that’s one of the things that I talk with folks is you can’t market your way out of a bad enrollment strategy. All the billboards in the world, all the ads in the world aren’t going to get you what you want if you don’t have the enrollment strategy behind it. So totally there with
Shiro [00:21:26]:
you. Okay. Alright. We can move on. So, yeah, the next topic I wanted to talk about so let’s let’s dive deeper into this social media, content stuff that we’ve been talking about. So, I think in our prior call, in our intro meeting, we talked about what you said about strategy before technology. Right? Can you describe a little bit what you mean by that and also some of the few mistakes you see with social media accounts?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:21:53]:
Yeah. And so I think for colleges, like, our relationship with educational technology kind of follows our current strategy of being siloed into functional units. Right? Colleges are deeply siloed institutions. We all kinda live on the same campus. We do very different functions, and we ping pong the students back and forth between our offices. When technology started to come on the scene, we saw technology being built specifically for those silos. Right? This is gonna be for records. This is gonna be for advising.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:22:26]:
This is gonna be for student life, and we ended up with a massive tech stack of technology that didn’t talk to each other. And so I think we’re now getting into a space where we’ve kind we have the opportunity to sit down and say, we don’t have to function in silos like this. We can be more efficient, and let’s look at this from the student life cycle, the end user, and how they experience the strategy of our company, of our institutions, and let’s intelligently design something that makes sense because silos aren’t it. Right? Any organism, any any bureaucratic organization functions the way you design it. Right? The system is always designed to give you the exact outputs you’re getting. And so if you are not happy with the outputs, the solution is not just to cram more inputs down the pipeline. It’s to actually look at your pipeline and say, let’s if we could if we could redesign something from start to finish, what would we choose to make this better and easier? And so from a higher ed space, I think they we we we lean on our laurels a little bit too much and we call it college rigor. Right? Well, if the student just doesn’t have what it takes to get through college, right, that’s that’s part of the value of a college degree.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:23:40]:
You’re proving you can start what you finish and you have the rigor and the and the chutzpah to to get through this this process, this gauntlet of experiences. And and that’s cool and all, but also why are we putting all of the onus on the person in the relationship who knows the least about how this is supposed to go? Right? We know that we have a deeply, you know, low college knowledge population. We have a huge amount of 1st gen college students, especially in my area where I’m working. And so it’s disingenuous to say, well, this is all on the student to well, they just can’t make it through. They can’t they can’t run this gauntlet of experiences and be successful. It must be on them. I think we really need to be humble enough to take a look at the part that we play in designing that experience, right, especially in an age of 3rd millennium technology where I can tell Amazon my user habits, and it will auto ship toilet paper to my house. I can get a mortgage on my phone in less than 30 minutes.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:24:38]:
Technology has disrupted things and made it better, faster, cheaper, easier, and more smooth to to get get the desired output. Let’s use that because we know that our desired output is a more educated population. It’s to share the magic of what happens on our college campuses Mhmm. With as many students as possible and invite them into that conversation. Let’s stop gatekeeping it. And so using that ed tech technology space to make the friction that’s currently in the system, let’s get rid of it. Let’s make it easier to register for classes, get through to graduation. Why are we still making people file a paper application to graduate? We know they have the credits.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:25:17]:
Come on now. Like, this could be more efficient. And so we can learn from what other industries are doing to to not only help the end user, but also to help ourselves as a business. A lot of higher ed is deeply cumbersome. It is labor intensive. And in a market where the cost of labor is going up and we’re asking people to do more with less, and, yes, they love their jobs. But at the end of the day, if we can be more efficient, that’s more students that we’re gonna help. Right? And so if if I can do that in other industries, let’s translate it here into higher ed.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:25:52]:
And you can’t market your way out of a bad enrollment strategy. So just putting more things on social and and inviting students, you know, hey. Here’s a flyer on Instagram. Please, for the love of cheese, stop putting flyers on Instagram. No one is seeing it, first of all. Doing that just shows that you don’t understand how social works. You don’t understand how the community is using that platform. And so if we have something that we want everyone to see, let’s systemically design a system so that we can get those folks’ eyeballs on it.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:26:25]:
Let’s not just slap a flyer on Instagram and call it good. I could get really I’m really passionate about this, so I could talk about it all day long.
Shiro [00:26:32]:
Yeah. I I really like that, the college rigor mindset. Right? Like, imagine applying that to, like, hospitality to restaurants or something. Right? Like, as a customer, you would not like that experience, but that’s the experience everyone expects in today’s market economy or just life. Right? And
Kasandrea Sereno [00:26:51]:
Yeah.
Shiro [00:26:52]:
And so, like, let’s try and make let’s create a strategy that makes the end user, AKA the prospective student or current student, let’s make that process as easy as it can for them because that is the economy in Especially
Kasandrea Sereno [00:27:05]:
in this enrollment cliff. Right? Yeah. Folks have options. Here in the states, folks have options. I’m in a a smallish town. Right? I’m here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And so but still, I can throw a rock and hit 10 different institutions. So your students have choice, and students are gonna vote with their feet.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:27:24]:
And we know from all the 100 of years of pedagogy research that students stay at an institution where they feel supported, where they feel heard, where they feel nurtured. It’s not always brand and name recognition a lot of the times. And so let’s lean into that, and we know that we do amazing work. We know that our campuses change lives and we’re transformative and there’s magic that happens on a college campus that’s so fantastic. That’s why we work in this industry. And so let’s use social and our technology to spread that word in a way that makes sense and invites more people to the conversation versus gatekeeping it and saying, well, you know, just, you know, they just didn’t have what it took to be successful in college. Yeah. But also that end user, that student doesn’t understand that it’s a poorly designed system and it was the friction that pushed them out.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:28:14]:
They’re gonna internalize it and say, well, you know what? This is just really hard. Maybe college isn’t for me. And maybe the cure for cancer is in one of those kids’ heads, and college is for them. They just didn’t recognize that it was a poorly designed system that was not as easy to get through as some of the other systems that we have. Right? Amazon has one click ordering, and so that is because they want to make the the desired action the easiest one to take. Let’s apply that principle to higher ed.
Shiro [00:28:44]:
Yeah. No. I I I completely agree, and I think I speaking to a lot of guests about this topic, right, about how can we make the ex experience, the process easier for the student is is definitely, like, very, very top of mind, and I think all marketing people, enrollment people, admission people feel the same way. So Mhmm. I definitely hear it. I also wanted to dig a little bit deeper on your comment around, don’t put post flyers on social media. Like, can you tell me a little bit more about, like, social media and why you shouldn’t use it as your event calendar?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:29:16]:
Yeah. So a lot of what we see as content that we get, we get asked as marketers to push out on social is, hey. Tell us tell tell students about this department event that’s coming up or, hey, the career center is super important. We wanna keep pushing all of these things out there and tell students, you know, all the things that they need to know. That is not what social was designed for. Social is heavily edutainment. Right? And so how many of us, you know, know that we should eat better and go to the gym, but we just don’t do it? Right? And so we’re gonna do things that are natural and that are easy. And so pushing that kind of content, a, you’re gonna spend a lot of time, not get a lot of eyeballs, and it’s not gonna give you the the results that you want.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:30:00]:
You’re gonna be frustrated as the content creator to say, oh, I just spent 20 hours making this video about how to register for classes, and I put it on Instagram and I got, like, 3 likes. Well, okay. Cool. But that, a, wasn’t the message that works for that platform and, b, that platform has an algorithm. Your whole audience isn’t going to see it. So you’re already segmenting for a small amount of eyes. And so instead of doing that, let’s think about how do we have a robust calendar management system. Most colleges I talk to don’t have an internal calendar management system.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:30:35]:
If they have one, it is siloed out into one campus space and that one unit uses it. So, okay, student life has their calendar and it’s in an app, but then academic affairs has something on a website but also maybe something in LMS. And so we’re hoping you stumble over our calendar and you get to use it versus funneling all that traffic to one centralized space to be able to say, you wanna know what’s going on on campus? We have a million things going on on campus. Here’s where you find them. Here’s where you search for them. Here’s the ability to follow calendars that make sense to you. Oh, you’re on a sports team? Fantastic. Follow that calendar.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:31:13]:
Oh, you’re in the psychology club? Fantastic. Follow that calendar. Make it easy to be found. Right? That’s the golden rule of relationships. Make it easy to be loved. And so push all of your effort to drive to that one central hub. Make that central hub robust and stop splitting the stream and trying to have people guess how to find out where you are. Have a great calendar system, have something that students can opt in, opt out, follow what they need, and make it easy to get eyes on your events is hands down the easiest thing you can do to for maximum impact to get these folks to come to your events.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:31:50]:
You’re already putting on amazing events. Mhmm. Really cool lectures with amazing professionals and corporate tours and fun parties for students to go to. If you it’s a it’s the old adage of a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, did it actually happen? So many amazing events in higher ed language because we just don’t have the proper, communication strategy behind them.
Shiro [00:32:11]:
Right. I’m trying to think of, the right idiom or phrase for this, but, like, creating, like, the event is, like, half the work. The other half is, like, marketing it, putting in the places that you need to
Kasandrea Sereno [00:32:24]:
Yes.
Shiro [00:32:24]:
Because the distribution part is often, like it’s the it’s a very hard piece. And, you know, putting it on a centralized event calendar is, like, one step, I think, of the many to distribute an event properly.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:32:37]:
I think so. And, honestly, if if colleges would get that pivot, it would free up your content to do those really cool things that invite people to the conversation. Right? So don’t use your Instagram to tell me this lecturer is coming. Use the calendar for that. Use your Instagram to to help me feel the FOMO of, oh my gosh. I missed out. They had, you know, this amazing author came to campus and did a book signing, and I missed it. Oh my gosh.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:33:04]:
Use social for what it was intended to, which is show off experiences So that way students see that piece and then say, oh, I didn’t know we had a speaking series on campus. Let me go to the calendar so I can put it on my calendar and schedule it. Also, a lot of our students work. If you don’t tell me about something 2 weeks in advance, it’s not making it to my calendar, and I’m not going. Can’t request off work. I can’t build it into my schedule to go, and so you have to we’re trying to teach students time management. We need to model that as well.
Shiro [00:33:35]:
That’s amazing. And I think I’ve I’ve I’ve gone, like, a ton of one line zingers from this call already, but entertainment, like like, I feel like, you know, how some some teams have, like, a billboard or or something up in there. Like, this is our goal for this year. You know? Like, the one word or one phrase. Like, I feel like a lot of social media teams can just put entertainment right there.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:33:55]:
It really is. It opens up so much content ability. Right? Right. People love to learn. You can just go to TikTok and you’re learning something, how to change your oil, how to do something else. We have on our campus some of the most knowledgeable humans on obscure topics anywhere in the world. We literally hang on to them, pay them, and they hang out with us. And so you have a content gold mine.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:34:18]:
Find that faculty who’s doing that really obscure research on toads in the rainforest and get his passion for what he does on camera and invite students and invite your community to geek out over that cool thing about toads in the Amazon that he’s interested in. That’s the magic of the Internet is to connect like minded people around topics that they’re interested in. That is gonna drive folks to your content. That’s gonna engage those students. And then that student who’s maybe states away, who’s like, you know what? I also love toads, and I’m passionate about the Amazon. And I love that this faculty member at x y z university exists. I wanna go study with him. That’s your enrollment strategy.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:35:00]:
That’s your attraction principle. That’s your your admissions hook to be like, we have all these amazing faculty. Don’t you wanna come learn from them? It it’s a different imagining in the way that we position in market higher ed. We’re already doing cool stuff. We’re not good at inviting other people into that conversation with us.
Shiro [00:35:18]:
It’s so true. I liked your example of the lecture. Right? Like, don’t make a content post promoting the event. Go to the event. Mhmm. Film some short form video, and then post the content. Like, here are my 3 key takeaways from this lecture. Exactly.
Shiro [00:35:33]:
It on the social and, like, create that FOMO that you’re just talking about. It’s it’s great. I do have to give a quick shout out to Purdue for the this is Purdue podcast. Kate Young Kate Young is the host. That’s what they exactly do. They highlight faculty, athletics, and they do these really amazing, like, interviews with the people on campus that are really striving the institution and the local community for it. And I think they do such a good job of, like, highlighting the content that already exists. You know? And so just quick shout out there.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:36:05]:
Yeah. That’s great.
Shiro [00:36:07]:
Yeah. And I know we’re just at about time here today. I’m I’m wondering I I already gave you a lot of shout outs, but, like, any plugs here on where people can connect with you and learn more about you or the community you build on Higher Ed Social?
Kasandrea Sereno [00:36:20]:
Yeah. Definitely come join the community. If you Google Higher Ed Social, we have a a a platform. We’re on every platform. We have a community there. So we’re on LinkedIn. We’re on, you know, Instagram. We’re on TikTok.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:36:33]:
We’re on all of those things. Facebook is probably our most active community because we’re all sitting in front of computers all day every day and can pop in and out of the community. I am just really simple. If you just Google my name, Cassandra Serino, I’m on everything, and so I love getting to talk with folks about this this this program and what we’re doing and, you know, strategizing with with colleges and universities is some of my favorite work. So if I can be of help, if if I can you know, do you need a speaker for something? Do you need to bounce ideas off of? Let me know. I love visiting colleges. I love coming to talk to people about this work. I love amplifying the voices of some of our members that are doing amazing work and what they’re doing because I’m just a sideline person.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:37:16]:
Right? I’m that armchair quarterback on the side. I’m getting to aggregate what I’m hearing from all of these folks, and then I’m getting to watch in real time as our members are building these incredible communication stacks for their colleges. And so, yeah, come and come and see us. We would love to have you. We’re all over and, yeah, the more members, the better.
Shiro [00:37:35]:
Well, thank you so much. This has been a really fun conversation. So I appreciate you for joining. Thank you so much.
Kasandrea Sereno [00:37:42]:
Definitely. Thanks, guys. Have a great have a great rest of your day.
