Social Media Leaders gather in Sydney this May

Social media has become the Generations Z’s primary means of interaction with the world. With 89% of 18-29 year olds checking their social media daily, its influence is more prominent than ever. This love for social is being applied to their post-secondary lives, informing school selection, course choice and shaping their involvement in the higher education experience. For professional communicators working within post-secondary, attention to this shift is critical.

Once seen as a place to share personal photos or weekend happenings, social media has evolved into an unparalleled potential for business, utilising this worldwide addiction to propel strategy and objectives.

Social media within the higher education sector allows for large scale reach and recruitment, fast, effective engagement and the ability to connect with like-minded individuals. Networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat lead the way in providing platforms that deliver easy to access, bursts of information tailored to target audiences.

Whether your reasons for using social media lay within building human connections, community engagement, and recruitment or to maintain your public image, there are always new uses, advancements and possible potential of social media that is left untapped.

There are 2,230,000,000 active users of Facebook, and 1,000,000,000 active users of Instagram per month. With these numbers growing daily, the struggle to stay relevant and competitive within the growing social media environment is becoming a primary concern.

In business today, there is no success without strategy. Such can be said for social media strategies within the higher education sector. Without one, success is out of reach, irrelevance is inevitable and competition will surpass your efforts.

Developing a clear and effective social media strategy is essential in developing content, meeting organisational goals and ensuring a return on investment is being made. Without a foundational strategy in place, you can forget the latter.

Akolade’s 3^rd Social media for Higher Education Forum will be taking place from the 21-23 May 2019 at the Pullman Hyde Park Sydney. This event brings together sector leaders to discuss how to best utilise data and analytics to inform social media strategy that maximises student recruitment and engagement, whilst ensuring a return on investment is being made.

This forum will explore strategic ways to develop content, expand audiences and stay competitive within this dynamic environment. This event will capture current trends and identify future ones to ensure your social media strategy stays relevant. All of this is essential in building a successful social media campaign.

The forum will focus on the following key areas:

• Develop a foundational social media strategy that will endure the dynamic environment
• Efficiently analyse social media data to maximise you ROI
• Create engaging content to maximise student recruitment and engagement
• Stay competitive by identifying future trends and technologies
• Achieving considerable results with restrained resources and minimal expenditure

We will be joined by social media experts across Australia’s top universities including, University of NSW, University of Technology Sydney, University of Michigan USA Western Sydney University, Macquarie University and many more! We are also delighted to have Facebook, Bauer Media, WWF Australian and NRL as our cross sector case studies!

Hear from University of Michigan, USA as they discuss how to unlock the potential of social media to achieve and exceed organisational goals.  Learn how you can shape your social media strategy to adapt to your evolving audience with University of NSW.

Ultimately, the event will also address ways to develop efficient and effective social media strategies, how to best implement them, analysing social media data to measure ROI and look at current and future social media trends.

For more information please click here to view our incredible line-up of speakers and the agenda.

Vishi Peters

Conference Producer

Akolade