TikTok for Higher Education Outreach: Engaging Gen Z Students

In this episode of FYI, Gil Rogers sits down with respected higher education marketing expert Kyle Campbell to discuss TikTok and its use in higher education marketing.

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Who is Kyle Campbell?

Kyle is the founder of Education Marketer, a podcast host, and respected higher education content marketing expert.

In this Episode

Kyle Campbell, the founder of Education Marketer, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about what happens when the dynamic world of TikTok collides with the academic arena of higher education marketing. In a landscape where every second of content is a precious commodity, they dive into why higher education marketing must move past the ‘like’ button to create stories that resonate and inform. 

If you’re involved in higher education or simply curious about the nexus of social media and academia, this conversation is your playbook for navigating the ever-evolving rules of digital engagement.

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Episode Transcript

Harnessing TikTok for Innovative Higher Education Outreach with Kyle Campbell 

Publishing Date: March 26, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, we welcome back to the show, founder and managing director of Education Marketer, Kyle Campbell. Kyle and I sit down and talk about a lot of topics, but mostly focused around TikTok and the use of video in institution strategies for content marketing.

Let’s listen in.

[00:00:31] Gil: Hey, Kyle. Welcome back.

[00:00:34] Kyle: Hello! Thank you for having me. I love coming on here because I never have any questions up front and I feel almost chill. It’s really cool. It’s like having a coffee with someone.

[00:00:43] Gil: That’s it. I got my coffee right here. So, we’re good.

[00:00:45] Kyle: And I’ve got mine.

[00:00:47] Gil: There we are. Yeah. So, coffee with Kyle and Gil. Welcome, everyone. So, Kyle, you’ve been on before, and we’ve had lovely conversations. You’ve been on multiple times. You had your episode, and then you were on, like, the all-star episode we had. And I feel like it’s one of those check-in with you every six months or so on what’s going on because there’s so much change in the higher ed marketing world, particularly, around social media platforms, engagement, and all that sort of stuff.

So, we’ll put links to your prior appearances in the episode notes, but for people who are new to the podcast or might not have met you before, I’d love the 50,000-foot view of Kyle Campbell and how you got where you are.

[00:01:22] Kyle: Sure. I mean, at the core of it, I’m a higher ed marketing consultant. I guess what makes me a little bit different is that I also have a regular newsletter that I write for higher education marketers all over the world. I publish that every couple of weeks. A paid version comes out weekly. And I also update on various trends going on in high-res social media, on LinkedIn, podcasts, whatever channel you consume your content.

So, if you want to get a better view of what’s going on Setser, but crucially how new technologies impact what we do day to day, my stuff’s probably a good first point of call.

[00:01:58] Gil: Yeah. So, let’s start there, right? I think, you know, your LinkedIn content is great. I follow it regularly. And if you’re not following Kyle on LinkedIn, you should. You do a great job of, kind of, making things digestible for everyone, to really take, kind of, key points and learn from and apply them quickly.

I wanted to talk about TikTok, specifically, to kick us off, because, obviously, in the U.S. there’s conversations around, like, every six weeks or so we talk about, are we banning TikTok or not? But that conversation aside, I think it’s about, at its core, taking a step back from just an individual channel and talking about social media in general. A lot of institutions struggle with measuring and really valuing engagement with their content. I think they value it in a sense that they like likes, they like comments and they like shares, but they can’t triangulate around, like, what’s actually driving impact of their content and what’s driving impact of their efforts, whether it be enrollment or community engagement or advancement?

And you had some interesting commentary about TikTok recently, specifically, on where that, kind of, fits in our ecosystem when it comes to social media for higher ed. And I’d love for you to, kind of, give us a look at that, and then we can dive into that a little bit further.

[00:03:11] Kyle: Yeah, sure. I’m a fan of how TikTok’s changed social media, maybe not necessarily all the content that’s on it and moderation issues. But I think any destructor that comes into the market and mixes up how we do things is usually quite a good thing in the long term.

What I see in higher education is that we have jumped on this app. We’ve got some decent reach and some decent engagement. And to be clear, the engagement on TikTok is way, way better for higher education than any other social media platform. So, the latest benchmark from Rival IQ has just been released. And the average engagement rate on TikTok for higher ed is something stupid, like, 9.5%. Doesn’t sound like much, but for social media engagement, that’s off the charts. And compared to other sectors, other industries, the mean average is, what is this, 2.5% engagement or something like that. So, for higher ed, TikTok seems to be a good fit.

Crucially, though, that’s down from around 16% last year. So, it’s still good. But engagement on the app is slightly declining. And it made me think, when we publish content on this channel, a lot of the stuff I read about success and what works on that platform is all focused on the content’s performance itself. So, we know a video that got 50,000 views, we know it’s got a 9.2% engagement. But where I see less effort and less focus is, okay, so what is that actually doing to brand lift? What’s it doing to recruitment? If someone engages with you in TikTok, are they more likely to convert? Do they do it faster?

We’re in a day and age where you can actually track those things. But I wonder if that conversation or even connecting those two ideas is happening to the extent that it really should be. So, I think that’s a good starting point for us to jump off in a few different angles. But yeah, I think the engagement thing’s great, but I don’t always necessarily see what that turns into.

[00:05:12] Gil: Yeah. And I think that’s an important bit to the conversation, too. I think, back to, I’ve got gray hair and a gray beard, so I can say the early days of social media in higher ed, because I was there, right? And so, it used to be just, how many followers on platform can I get, or how many likes does this post get?

And I’ve had folks on, over the past few weeks, talking about social media. And our running gag is, you know, make it go viral, right? That’s the directive that we get with content, is make it go viral. And as a marketer and outside of hosting this podcast, I serve as fractional CMO for a couple of companies, marketing director, et cetera. And what I look at is not how many likes or comments a post gets. I look at how many conversions that post gets, and like we’re still driving traffic to the site and either downloading the e-book or getting a demo request or whatever.

And obviously, I’m looking at it from a B2B marketing lens versus a B2C lens, which is what higher ed institutions are looking at it through. But the lessons are the same, right, in a sense that you don’t want to just put out content for putting out content’s sake. You want that content to, A, resonate, which I think we check that box in some respect based on the engagement rate. But then, what is that doing to, like you mentioned, downstream on application numbers, inquiries for admission, alumni giving, whatever the channel is?

I would love, before we go further down that channel, to really hone in on that point. You mentioned for higher ed, specifically on TikTok, engagement is off the charts relative to other industries. But it seems to be trending downward in some respects. So, there’s some course correcting there we can do. I’d love your thoughts on why higher ed’s engagement seems to be performing well TikTok, specifically.

[00:06:53] Kyle: So, I think there’s a few reasons why higher ed’s probably got this inherently bigger advantage than other sectors. Firstly, the number of people that we engage with via TikTok is a smaller audience. If you compare the size of audiences following other industry accounts, they tend to be a little bit larger. They’re a little bit less focused, a bit niched. So, therefore, it’s easier to engage with an audience if they’re more targeted and smaller and they directly have impact from what you’re talking about.

Secondly, it’s the demographic as well. So, if you look at TikTok, we’ve got this huge audience of Generation Z. That’s the primary audience to universities. The two just really go hand in hand, and they give content that’s published by higher institutions on that platform, just that extra bit of boost and engagement.

So, there’s an inherent advantage built into it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that TikTok is amazing in terms of engagement overall. It is still declining. And if you look at some of the most recent things driving that, sure, we’ve got the bills coming in that will almost lead to a ban. We don’t know it’s going to happen. And there’s pressure around that. But equally, TikTok have made a lot of decisions in the last few months to really prioritize TikTok Shop and that commercial aspect of the platform.

And that is changing the nature of the content that is published on there and what does well. And you don’t have to look too far in comments on videos, whatever it is, especially if they are TikTok Shop-related, they’re really negative. People don’t necessarily want to see this stuff in their feed. And okay, TikTok’s making quite a bit of revenue off the back of this, but it seems to be harming, or at least changing, the relationship that users have with the platform; hence, the lower engagement rate on content overall.

It’s almost turning into a shopping network, which comes back to our original, sort of, focus, is, how do you use this platform? How valuable is it? In the past, it might have been more valuable. But increasingly, as it moves to that commercial element, how valuable will it be for higher education? I’m not convinced it will hold that same level of value as it has then.

[00:09:08] Gil: Yeah. And I think that, I mean, you just follow the life cycle of a new social media platform, right, is, comes out, there’s buzz, there’s engagement, people clamor to it. And then the minute that there’s a high population of student audience on a platform, parents start coming into it, colleges start coming into it, marketers start coming into it. And it poisons the well. And then they hop off and move on to the next thing, right?

And I think that there’s certain… just the pace in which that’s happened with TikTok is faster than other platforms. With that said, you know, every year, there’s articles about how Facebook is dead. And Facebook is still here, right? Twitter is dead, and Twitter actually is dead. It’s X now. But still, like, there’s still conversations. Even though I haven’t been on Twitter in two years at this point, maybe even more I stopped paying attention, maybe as a marketer, that’s a bad decision to make is not being [crosstalk 00:09:58].

[00:09:59] Kyle: I don’t think it’s a bad decision. I think it’s nice, and it’s…

[00:10:02] Gil: But it’s one of those, like, my mental health couldn’t wrap my head around being on that platform anymore, where it’s like it’s an echo chamber. Even the positive conversations had a certain level of toxic positivity to it, where you couldn’t even question any type of… especially in the higher ed, kind of, that happens there, you can’t question anything, otherwise you start going the other direction, right?

And so, I love this kind of thought process around the value that the platforms bring into the lives of the users, right? And I think that there’s a certain element of, when it gets to commercial, people run off to the next thing because they get tired of being sold to, right? And it’s, you know, sometimes we forget that students are consumers, too, and we walk into our board meetings or to our planning meetings around content and what we’re going to do to try to engage our audiences. And it reverts back to the same old thing, which is just blast our message out there, which works on a new channel time, but then we start to see it taper off, right? Am I on base with that kind of summary?

[00:11:03] Kyle: Yeah. And I think we also forget the real basic thing that we all know in our hearts, that people use social media because they’re bored and they want to be distracted or they’ve got some spare time. If you’re using it as a channel in which to convert and communicate your USPs and all that sort of stuff, it does work, don’t get me wrong, but you’ve just got to read the room. If you’re posting a piece of content on a weekend, for instance, or a certain point, whatever it is, you just have to be aware that this is a very noisy channel, the content is moving. Like a highway, it’s really fast. Got to think about hooks, entertainment, what will encourage someone to keep watching, engaging.

It’s very much into that entertainment realm now. And we’ve seen social media move from something that’s more about conversations into something more like a brand media play of the old school. And now, we see a lot of that conversation moving to private groups, specialized apps, all focused around that community element, which is very… it’s almost like social media split in two around two years ago. And we’re seeing that momentum come to our head now with something like TikTok that used to be very much about, the every person going viral has now become the biggest social media app in existence. And it’s done so in a very short period of time. It’s a real shift in how we think about social media.

[00:12:23] Gil: Yeah. You’ve seen my viral TikTok dance video that I do, right? If you find a video of me doing a dance video on TikTok, that is a deep fake of all deep fakes. There’s no way. I don’t have the knees for TikTok dance videos.

Speaking of videos, though, I was on a podcast last year, and we started talking about video, right, and how higher ed has still yet to really, kind of, master that channel. On one argument, it’s all give up and walk away because everything you make is cringe, right? But on the other side of it is… I’m talking like my daughter today. The other side of it is, you know, no, we got to figure it out because that’s how people communicate with each other. That’s how they engage.

And I think, kind of, I look at higher ed in two halves — pre-COVID and post-COVID, right? Pre-COVID, video wasn’t really a big thing. It was all your university commercial and the B roll video that’s on the back of your website. That was our video strategy, right?

And then during COVID, it was virtual events, “Zoom sessions,” whatever, right, where you’re doing informational sessions and content, which step in the right direction as far as authenticity and not polished interview, but more of a engagement Q&A type of thing. And now, post-COVID, it’s, we’ve got these channels that are a great distribution channel for video content, but higher ed still hasn’t necessarily mastered video as a process.

And I guess, why is that? Why is everything that higher ed produces suss when it comes to video content?

[00:13:57] Kyle: I think a lot of institutions don’t play to their strengths to where they could have impact with video content. So, you see a lot of emphasis going on the brand video, the YouTube presence. A few problems. Firstly, YouTube, especially, like, a channel that you built, it should just be that. It should be a channel. It should have a content strategy behind it. There should be a thing you’re trying to achieve for that channel, not just using it as a hosting platform for your stuff.

And at the same time, and I think there’s probably more opportunity for universities in this area, I think they need to use video as a different part of the cycle. Universities are home to some of the most incredible content on the planet. And the challenge we have is that it’s always locked away in courses. And I think video is a very good way of unpackaging a lot of the content that makes the university remarkable and presenting it in a different way.

So, I’ve seen this in the U.S. and I’ve seen it gain momentum in the UK as well. A lot more schools are now investing in creating tester or taster programs of the content that you’re going to buy, i.e. the course you’re going to become part of. And there’s companies that have come in now to do that for you. You can do it on your own. But I’ve seen taster sessions that take a part of a degree and then turn that into a short course that a student can try for free. And then, naturally, as a result of doing that, they’re more open to what they’re going to learn.

And all of that is treated through video content. The academics are presented in a great studio environment. They’re edited. There’s graphics put in. It makes that course content just distinctive, engaging, and something that people remember, rather than just seeing a course page or program descriptions, whatever it is.

So, we use video a lot at the top of the funnel to say, “Look at our amazing campus. This is what you’re going to experience here.” We don’t use it enough to let people to try the experience before they buy it. And I think that’s where the opportunity is. And we haven’t focused on that in the past.

[00:15:53] Gil: Yeah. And I think a lot of that, the proliferation of that becomes, and to go back to TikTok, is the shortest of the short form video, right? Like you mentioned, the hook, the entire message, and the call to action has to be wrapped up in about a 4.2-second bow. Otherwise, you’ve lost them, and they’re swiping on to the next thing. And I think the traditional approach is this brand building, storytelling, long-form messaging type of approach for their content, which was what we did “during COVID,” right, was our information session.

We had people doing six-hour virtual open houses during COVID. But then you realize that, when you look at the engagement and the data on the performance of that six-hour open house, they could have engaged the same amount of people with a 30-minute info session max.

And so, I think it comes down to higher ed oftentimes we want the students to care about the things that we care about, not think about what they care about and put that message out there, because that’s where the faculty push and pull and the institutional brand, what they want to be known for. And this is why we have arguments about what content should be on the homepage of a website, right, is the .edu domain serves so many different constituencies, that it’s difficult. But at the end of the day, your website is your marketing channel to reach prospective students. That’s priority number one.

Faculty should have their own subdomain of stuff they can go to, right? Like, there’s, I think we’ve got to use our channels as the marketing vehicles that they are. And video platforms are those TikTok, YouTube, et cetera, are the ways that people need to be engaged. And I think that, like, to your point, I worked at a college that had this awesome marine biology program back in the day. And it’s like, if you could just send a camera out on a boat when the students are going out and doing algae sample analysis in the Long Island, right, and then edit that tape, but that takes effort, right, is to get that day of content of having a video person there were filming and knowing what to film and knowing how to film. I feel like that’s why, like, the Amazon college tour videos did so well, is that people can’t do that stuff themselves, right? But when Amazon Prime comes knocking and saying, “Hey, we’ll make this super awesome video, and we’ll give you all the content that you can use for your own stuff later,” that has a lure to it because, otherwise, it never gets done. I think creating that kind of content is always on the list, but it never actually comes to fruition.

[00:18:19] Kyle: Well, there’s your idea, isn’t it? Like, the reason these programs work is because they have a defined objective and output. It’s a complete series. They’ve really mastered the format. The Amazon Prime series is, it’s long form. It’s, like, 45 minutes to an hour for every episode. So, they’ve decided that they’re using video in that way.

And what we have at universities is they tend to stick in the middle. All their videos are different lengths, they’re different topics, they’re different themes, different formats, different branding. It looks really strange when you land on the university’s channel because there’s no coherence.

Weekly, we’ve spoken about long form. And we’ve touched on TikTok as the short-form vehicle.

It’s fascinating when you look at how user behavior is different or types of users watching content is different compared to long form versus short form. So, if you go into analytics of the YouTube page right now in the university, you’ll notice that the majority of the users who are new to your content, they arrive via your short-form content, your YouTube Shorts. Your long-form content tends to be people who have already discovered you or existing subscribers or at least familiar to you. But shorts, and I did an analysis of a university probably around six months ago, I think 90% of the views on their short-form content was new people, non-subscribers.

So, there’s definitely a sentiment to understand what type of audience you’re attracting with certain formats, how it all fits in together. And that gives your channel and your presence at least the foundation to grow in the right direction, rather than just publishing whatever comes down the content production track.

[00:19:57] Gil: Yeah. And I think that takes just looking at it, like you said, having a content strategy around video and looking at it from, where are the students in their “buyer journey,” right? Their consideration, are they on application? Are they admitted? And this is tale as old as time, students who are further down in the funnel are more likely to engage in the more in-depth content because they care more, right? And they’re more invested in your brand. And that’s why you don’t send the 45-page viewbook to every name that you buy from a testing agency, or at least you shouldn’t. And I know schools that do, and that’s not a good idea, but they do anyway. And then we complain that we don’t have enough budget. But that’s neither here nor there.

But think about your video content like you should be doing with the rest of your content. What’s the top of the funnel? Awareness, engagement, building, kind of, pre-funnel type stuff. What is this stuff? And we have arguments about, is it a funnel? Is it a stream? There’s a whole different conversation around how we should build our conflows, but when and where that content is used matters, right? And we’ve got to think about where… and again, as institutions, we want every student in the world to watch our 45-minute Amazon Prime video, right? Like, because we spent a lot of money on that, and we want to make sure that everyone watches it that possibly can. But we need to be more mindful about how our… about where that content is used. And that’s when we’ll see better engagement with it throughout the process.

I look at, like, platforms, like, Subject, right? Subject, they do academic courses online. And, like, if you think about, what courses online looked like 15 years ago, it was a laptop in the back with a webcam on it of a lecture hall with the professor writing on a whiteboard. And that was our solution for online classes. And now, we’ve really stepped up the delivery of courses online to be more like masterclass type of appeal, to be more edutainment type of an approach, versus just, here’s the professor in the back, very far away because we’ve got the laptop in the back of the room kind of a thing.

And so, we’ve really got to hone in on what content lives where and how that content is produced to really resonate on that platform, which is a lot of work, right?

[00:22:11] Kyle: Yeah. No, it’s an incredible amount of work, which is why you should have a content strategy as a large part of your marketing strategy, not just content as this tactical operational thing. It really has just morphed now. I mean, I’d go as far to say that content is marketing. I don’t see any distinction between the two now.

How do people discover things? We pretty much do it for a screen that’s, what, six inches tall. That’s how we view the world. I know it’s not great to say it, but that seems to be the reality of how we first get introduced to things. And then we might upgrade that experience by going to an in-person event, but usually that initial form of discovery, that first hand approach, is through a digital channel.

[00:22:50] Gil: And I think that’s what’s happened over time, is that it used to be that the digital content was the afterthought, right? It was, we got to make our event plans for our open houses and our travel and our regional sessions and visit campus tours every day and that sort of stuff, which we still do, right? You still need to do that because the students who are deeper in that consideration set need those types of experiences. But I’ve seen this with nieces and nephews and friends who have college-age-going kids. I have many families that I’ve spoken with that they didn’t visit any of the schools they applied to. They did all their research online, decided to apply. Then once they get into the schools, they start to segment which ones they want to go to. And what are they doing first? They’re going on to the school’s Instagram accounts. They’re engaging with the content that’s on their website. They’re doing that research first.

And it used to be the other way around. You used to visit 10, 15, 20 schools to filter out which ones you were going to apply to. That’s costly, it’s time consuming, and it’s stressful. And so, this makes it a lot easier, thinking about where digital content, particularly, video, fits into a content plan and a marketing plan. I think you’re right. Content is everything in marketing, right? It’s about the right message at the right time via the right sender through the right channel, right?

And that’s something that I always say tale as old as time, you know, the ways that we distribute content has changed. That lesson has been the same for decades. And I think we just need to rethink where video and virtual fit and flip it, which is hard for the tried-and-true admissions people that have been doing this for 10, 15 years to say, “Oh, wait, I’m not the star of the show. The student is the star of the show.” And we need to think about them and their needs in the process and not what we want them to do, but meet them where they are.

[00:24:38] Kyle: Yeah, 100%.

[00:24:39] Gil: So, cool. I appreciate the time. I always love talking with you, Kyle, and picking your brain on things. And I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a TikTok novice. I do not have a viral dance video across the internet. So, to get your insights, especially on just the analysis of the platform, I think, is extremely helpful to me and, I know, is helpful to our listeners.

For people who want to get in touch with you and stay connected, subscribe to your newsletter, how would they best go about doing that?

[00:25:07] Kyle: Best place, as always, is educationmarketer.co.uk. So, yeah, website, proper old school, but I think it’s the biggest content strategy of the time. You have to have a place that you own that an algorithm can’t take away from you. And in 2024, that is a website. It is a URL that can’t be taken.

[00:25:27] Gil: There we go. And we will put the links to get in touch with you in the episode notes. And as always, we thank our listeners for taking some time to be with us today. And we will see you next time on FYI.

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