Wrapping Up the Salesforce Higher Education Summit 2020 with Social Studio

Last week, on June 16, Salesforce.org hosted its very first virtual Higher Education Summit. The new half-day virtual event featured keynote sessions, breakout rooms with five different session tracks, virtual partner booths, and even a networking lounge. Though we did miss the opportunity to connect with our customers, partners, and higher education friends in person, the virtual Higher Education Summit was indeed a success, as it connected higher education professionals and technology experts from across the world!

Joining the Conversation – The Day of the Event

Because this event was entirely virtual, our team decided to track the social insights surrounding the Higher Education Summit using Salesforce Social Studio. Here’s what we found:

Throughout the day, there were over 1,000 conversations and posts on social media related to the Higher Education Summit 2020 (based on #HESummit20 and #EdTech, two of the most popular hashtags used at the event), and 99.6% of those posts were on Twitter. Social Studio also identified that 86.3% of posts about the Summit included positive sentiments (although, to be fair, much of what Social Studio determined to be negative included discussions centered around COVID-19). As a Salesforce Premium Implementation partner, this helped us focus on how we engaged with Summit attendees. We focused our time on Twitter and were able to view a live Twitter newsfeed of the #HESummit20 at a glance.

Social Studio also pulled some of the top words from the day, including the “#hesummit20” hashtag along with “education,” “community award,” and “innovation.” See the figure below to take a closer look at these insights. I love seeing such encouraging words like “congratulations,” “advocate,” and “love.” The Salesforce community has formed such a tight-knit family and this is amplified by the encouragement given to presenters, award winners, and the community at large.

One of the benefits of hosting the event virtually is the ability to further the reach of the event. Using Social Studio, we were also able to track conversations surrounding the Higher Education Summit by country. In the figure below, you can see conversations that were occurring all over the world. Most of the posts came from users in the United States (56.8%), India (19.9%), Canada (3.1%), and the United Kingdom (2.1%). The event drove traffic from all over the world while limiting travel costs for folks interested in hearing from some of the brightest minds in the higher education space.

Continuing the Conversation – Tracking Conversation After Event’s End

As displayed above, the virtual Higher Education Summit 2020 was streamed and talked about across the world. After gathering these metrics, I was interested to see how Post Volume and Top Words change after the event had ended. Here is what I found:

I was able to identify a significant 71% decrease in Post Volume in the week following the Higher Education Summit. I found this surprising because all of the sessions were recorded so attendees could watch later. To keep the conversation alive and engagement up, I would suggest utilizing and posting the recorded content to share more insight and knowledge with the audience. Utilizing more general hashtags on this content will also open up the opportunity for new impressions and leads.

The top words used following the Higher Education Summit were very similar to those used during the Summit, specifically “hesummit20,” “Trevor (in reference to keynote speaker Trever Noah),” and “education.” However, based on the figure below, continued conversations surrounding breakout sessions have decreased over time following the live event. This insight creates a great opportunity for you to share recorded Summit content as a way to keep the conversation going and increase engagement within the space.

These are only a few of the fantastic features included with Salesforce Social Studio. Within the platform, your marketing and social team can also publish and share posts, engage with followers, track the effectiveness of your content, and so much more. While we set up a dashboard specific to the Higher Education Summit this year, you can also set one up to track your brand, initiatives, and institution-specific hashtags in a more efficient and effective way. Check out the awesome session from the University of Arizona on how you can put together a roll-out plan to help increase user adoption of Social Studio.