Building a social media presence based on a strategic approach

CHALLENGE

Establishing a social media presence after demerge

The executive education program at the University of Vaasa is known to be among the best in the country in providing a service that supports professionals in their real-world positions. Separating the Executive Education program into its own company meant that the newly formed University of Vaasa Executive Education needed to define its brand identity and build its own presence on social media. 

Social media plays an important role in promoting new courses and highlighting their excellence. Being on social media requires a continuous commitment to maintaining activity and presence throughout the year. Brandkind had the opportunity to help ExEd take an organized approach to social media, optimizing the use of time and resources. After defining and refreshing the Vaasa Exed brand, it was time to build a solid Social Media Strategy. 

RESULTS

Regular engagement through use of unified themes

As a result of the Social Media Strategy work, we were able to help the University of Vaasa Executive Education marketing team build a publishing calendar that ensures a steady year-round presence in their selected channels. To lower the threshold for publishing regularly, we created a set of ready-to-use marketing themes and a variety of graphical templates for all of them.  

We are happy to see the internal team being active and utilizing the tools we built to ease up their work and free their time and resources to take care of the many other marketing and communications needs of the new organization at the same time. Social media isn’t too time consuming when you have a solid plan and the right tools to make on-brand publishing quick and easy. 

APPROACH

A deep-dive into the opportunities of social media

The Social Media Strategy for University of Vaasa Executive Education was developed as the outcome of an in-depth look at how they could best utilize social media as a means of promoting their services and building reputation for the newly formed business entity. This meant looking critically at the role of each social media channel and the audiences they could give us access to. This process included benchmarking the competition as well as evaluating the availability of resources in-house. 

To provide the best tools for the limited resources available for social media, we created a set of ready-to-use themes and templates to use amidst more reactive posting, promotion and engagement. An annual social media calendar was set up to help time regular postings as well as to allow for more systematic and predictive content creation.