From the Nominator

Less than three years ago, Ohio State’s marketing team engaged an analytics capstone class to evaluate the university’s enterprise social media accounts vs. a competitive set of eight similar universities. 

Our new senior director–just a couple months into the job–sat and listened as two independent student groups reached the same conclusion: Ohio State was the worst of the bunch. Ohio State’s accounts had the lowest average engagement per follower of all schools reviewed. We posted the highest percentage of links, and the lowest percentage of creative (videos/photos), resulting in a presence that simply didn’t resonate with our audiences. An in-house analytics intern even confirmed the findings. This low point set the stage for an ambitious turnaround.

Fast forward through a complete strategy overhaul, audience prioritization, restructuring of the team, investment in tools and multimedia resources, adoption of a formalized university social media policy, building of a true practitioner community across a decentralized campus, and hiring of some wonderfully talented people. We are proud to share this year that the hard-fought journey from worst-to-first within that peer set is complete.

Ohio State now ranks first in each major social media engagement metric tracked among those inherited peers, and fourth in the nation out of 405 colleges and universities overall for actions generated with our audiences (Shareablee, FY20, July 1, 2019-June 30, 2020). Those numbers are the result of a sustained effort to produce audience-centric content across our channels, while directly supporting university goals and campaigns.