The brief
Heriot Watt University Dubai is a pioneer of British education in the UAE, with the first overseas university campus to open in Dubai International Academic City. Heriot Watt offers a portfolio of undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes across subject areas including business management, engineering and computer science.
With a limited budget available to build their small LinkedIn social media presence against competitors in the region, Heriot Watt engaged Media Minds Global to deliver an organic and paid social strategy that would deliver substantial follower growth amongst target audiences, increased brand awareness and share of voice and higher levels of engagement.
The solution
Media Minds Global designed an integrated paid and organic social strategy to showcase Heriot Watt’s positioning as an educational pioneer within the Middle East and inspire potential students to pursue further education within the fields including management, engineering and the built environment. Working with Heriot Watt we targeted relevant audiences on LinkedIn, based on our analysis to tightly match the client’s content to those audiences who would be most interested and receptive.
An organic strategy to engage regularly with faculty and alumni showcased their achievements and the strong network across the university community to LinkedIn users. Alongside this, Media Minds ran paid engagement and brand awareness campaigns to extend the reach of award announcements, faculty articles in top tier media outlets and university news updates, increasing share of voice against the larger reach of competitors within the region.
Using our social tracking tool, OSCAR, we tracked the organic activity and performance of key competitors and compared Heriot Watt’s share of voice and engagement rates, making adjustments to the social media plan to optimise performance as needed.
The results
Across the last 17 months, our organic strategy to engage new audiences, content consultancy to improve content performance and paid brand awareness campaigns on LinkedIn have resulted in Heriot Watt achieving a faster rate of new follower growth on LinkedIn than any of their competitors within the region.
Heriot Watt’s LinkedIn page has achieved a follower growth of over 750 % with more than 8,000 new followers over 17 months). Audience growth has been driven to support the university’s student recruitment goals in priority locations amongst prospects with relevant interests and qualifications.
Faculty have also become measurably more engaged on LinkedIn, sharing their insights, webinars and press coverage. This has seen the University’s LinkedIn page achieve the highest weighted average engagement per post across all their key competitors within the region.
750% follower growth
Integrated organic and paid LinkedIn strategy
Highest weighted average engagement per post across key competitors
We have been getting amazing reviews from a lot of our internal stakeholders too. In fact, most of our staff now want to share posts only after its been posted on our LinkedIn page. A big, big thank you to you for all your efforts in achieving this milestone and for all your support this past year!
Alicia Gabriel
Head of Marketing,
Heriot-Watt University, Dubai