[1st Edition] The Groundworks for a New Higher Ed Social Media Tool

Good afternoon everyone!

If you are receiving this, you are officially one of the first people to see what I believe is the future of higher ed social media intelligence—and/or you have played a role in helping me learn how a better solution could exist & provided feedback. You’re of course welcome to unsubscribe, I won’t take offense.

This has been in the works for a while now, but we finally decided to take a stab at taking data we've been using internally and creating a tool that is specifically designed for higher ed. We move quick, and much to the dismay of my CTO, my personal goal is to have this fully launched by mid-January (ambitious), and potentially have a private beta for partial functionality as soon as the week of the 15th.

The purpose of this newsletter is to keep y'all informed on what's working & new, and the occasional ask for feedback to help shape the product further. Hopefully never too long so I can keep building! Feel free to forward these along to anyone else that might be interested in this journey!

TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read)

• Pulling content from Instagram, Facebook, & now TikTok

• AI is now categorizing posts by content type

• Private beta should be available next week

• Looking for feedback on account & content types

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WHAT’S NEW

Scraping Instagram, Facebook, & TikTok

We rewrote the entire backend functionality to support more platforms. We are starting with main accounts on Instagram, Facebook, & TikTok. Additionally, admissions Instagrams. The end goal will be to add X, YouTube, & LinkedIn for benchmarking & sub-colleges (i.e., Business Schools, Engineering Schools, Housing, [see section below for complete list]), but candidly it would bankrupt MeetYourClass haha, so that will be added later in the future once there is 100% validation a tool like this will be used.

Signing Up & Onboarding

Signing up & onboarding is completely finished. Our goal is to private beta our Research & Reporting functionality, then build out publishing for a public launch later. So right now it is set up to allow for you to join a team and build org structure.

CHALLENGES / ASKS

AI Categorizing Posts

We have added that every time our system detects a new post, we pass it along to AI to categorize the content into a predefined list of content types—up to 2 per post. It particularly struggles with trending topics/memes (i.e., looking at the example above for Wrapped content) since it doesn't have the entire internet as context. Overall it does very well otherwise.

My Question: How accurate would you expect these to be? Is some inconsistency okay?

What Am I Missing? Account & Content Types

We have 2 predefined lists.

Accounts—these are the colleges, departments, etc. that exist that eventually we would want to benchmark. Do you see any obvious departments that are missing? We don't want to get granular to programs, but if you are generating reports compared to others, let me know.

• Main Account",

• "Undergraduate Admissions",

• "Graduate Admissions",

• "Athletics",

• "Housing",

• "Dining",

• "Alumni",

• "Student Life",

• "College of Engineering",

• "College of Business",

• "College of Art & Design",

• "College of Education",

• "College of Nursing",

• "College of Medicine",

• "Graduate School",

• "Honors College",

• "College of Music",

• "College of Dentistry",

• "College of Vet Medicine",

• "College of Law",

• "College of Pharmacy",

• "College of Architecture",

• "College of Optometry",

• "College of Public Health",

• "College of Public Policy",

• "College of Social Work",

• "College of Communication",

• "College of Agriculture",

• "College of Information"

Content Type—this is what the AI is splitting up content into, up to 2 per post. Is it too much? Any redundancies? Or am I missing any?

• "Official Announcement",

  "Academic Content",

  "Campus Traditions",

  "Research & Innovation",

  "Open House/Campus Event Promotion",

  "Deadline Reminder",

  "Memes/Comedy",

  "Athletic",

  "Mascots",

  "Donor/Fundraising/Endowment Content",

  "Resources/Tips",

  "Aesthetic Content",

  "City & Local Guides/Content",

  "Campus Tours",

  "Dorm/Housing",

  "Food Content",

  "Alumni Features",

  "Current Student Features",

  "Faculty & Staff Features",

  "Current Events",

  "Rankings & Awards",

  "Day In the Life",

  "Ambassador/User Generated Content",

  "Financial Aid/Scholarship Content",

  "Job Outcome Highlight",

  "Club & Organization Highlight",

  "Program/Major Highlights",

  "Campus Life",

  "Greek Life / Fraternity / Sorority Life",

  "Exams/Midterms/Finals Week",

  "Orientation",

  "Graduation/Commencement",

  "Homecoming",

  "Move In/Move Out",

  "Game Day",

  "Holiday Related Content"

As always, I appreciate you all for your help so far. I'm very excited to keep this going. Be on the lookout on Fridays for my quick updates. I believe we are on the ground floor of something special!

We're always seeking your valuable advice and feedback. If you have any insights, thoughts, or ideas that you believe can contribute to our growth, we're all ears.

Thank you, once again, for being a part of our journey.

Best regards,

Blake

P.S. If you know anyone who would be interested in our updates, feel free to forward this email. :)

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