The times of counting on conventional prospectuses and scholar festivals for worldwide scholar recruitment are over. However universities and third-level establishments throughout the UK nonetheless depend on worldwide college students to spice up scholar numbers and funds.
Dependable worldwide scholar recruitment methods have additionally advanced within the digital age. Younger persons are more and more reliant on social media to study and uncover. In accordance with Sprout’s 2025 Pulse Survey, Gen Z (as we speak’s scholar candidates) are utilizing social media as their primary search engine, forward of conventional web sites like Google and new applied sciences like AI.
To draw new worldwide college students, your establishment’s social media presence is a vital instrument for recruitment that requires an energetic and strategic strategy.
The function of social media in worldwide scholar recruitment
Social media performs a major function in younger individuals’s decision-making course of and that is still true within the UK’s greater schooling market. Sprout Social’s Pulse Survey discovered that 52% of Gen Z usually tend to belief data from manufacturers and organisations on social media than they’re by means of conventional search or AI. Universities within the UK and overseas are utilizing their social media channels to create a variety of content material, together with:
Day within the life
Campus excursions
Visitor lectures
Scholar guides and extra
Selecting a college, notably in the event you’re going to review overseas, is a prolonged and punctiliously thought-about course of. Potential worldwide college students wish to really feel seen by their college of alternative, whereas their mother and father wish to be assured they’re making the precise resolution for his or her future. Social media content material can assist this resolution throughout each step.
Worldwide scholar recruitment methods for each stage of the journey
Your social content material ought to deal with a particular stage in your potential scholar’s journey. We’ve defined how your content material can assist college students each step of the way in which.
Analysis your viewers: Prioritise your worldwide scholar teams
Earlier than you begin creating content material, it’s essential perceive your viewers. Decide which nations you’re hoping to recruit from, and create distinct personas based mostly on these areas. Personas also needs to be tailor-made to sure levels and ranges of examine.
Feed this analysis into your platform selections. If you happen to’re concentrating on China, you’ll have to focus your efforts on platforms like Weibo. The College of Bristol manages a Weibo account particularly for Chinese language college students and has over 200,000 followers.
When you’ve created your personas, conduct additional analysis to raised perceive them and the kind of content material they want. Use superior instruments like Sprout Social Listening and aggressive evaluation to raised place your account, and to uncover information that may assist you refine your content material technique.
Consciousness: Showcase the coed expertise
In the course of the consciousness stage, it’s essential make potential college students conscious that your college exists. Institutional methods like boosting your rankings on world college lists may help, however you may as well depend on social media to construct an efficient consciousness marketing campaign.
The simplest content material varieties right here embody something that highlights the coed expertise. Which may embody:
Course breakdowns
On and off campus life movies
Spotlighting golf equipment and societies
Campus excursions
Deal with creating high-quality, skilled content material and circulating it as extensively as doable to extend your attain.
Mix this with scholar UGC campaigns to maximise your attain and belief. By encouraging your college students to additionally create content material round college life, you’ll be able to attain a wider pool of potential college students and make extra individuals conscious of what you’ll be able to provide.
Consideration: Spotlight worldwide scholar assist
As soon as college students know who you’re, present them why they need to think about selecting you. Content material at this stage ought to showcase your assist companies and the distinctive programs or communities you’ll be able to provide worldwide college students.
Q&As and livestreams may help reply particular questions college students might need at this stage. If you happen to’re struggling to maintain up along with your social inbox, implement a chatbot to filter queries.
Create content material that speaks particularly to worldwide scholar experiences at your uni. If doable, do that by means of distinctive accounts. Right here’s an incredible instance from the College of Glasgow, who has an Instagram account for its worldwide scholar assist workforce.
Resolution: Create personalised interplay
At this stage, college students can have determined to use to your college. Social content material right here ought to contain a mixture of basic content material and direct engagement, similar to with the consideration stage.
Your basic content material for college kids who’ve chosen your college ought to make it so simple as doable for them to use and be a part of your establishment. Create guides to assist them by means of the applying course of and inform them of what occurs subsequent.
Engagement is much more vital. Rigorously handle your social inbox, and attain out to any college students trying to transfer to your metropolis immediately. Use superior instruments like Sprout’s Sensible Inbox to make it simpler in your purposes workforce to handle and reply to messages, and create a simplified course of for connecting with college students through telephone or in individual after you’ve messaged them.
Onboarding: Construct group
Scholar onboarding is the method of scholars shifting to your college to start their research. This is a vital a part of every scholar’s life, so it’s important that you simply’re available to assist them.
Create content material like finances guides, metropolis life recommendation and scholar corridor excursions so college students know what to anticipate when shifting. Showcase your golf equipment or directs them to occasions like scholar festivals. It’s best to create particular content material for Freshers’ week, which is when numerous UK college students be a part of golf equipment and begin making buddies on their course.
It’s additionally vital to construct a group in your worldwide college students. These communities make their scholar life simpler and extra satisfying, as it could actually assist them join with different college students and assist companies. Social platforms like Discord may help create a protected area for interplay. The College of Brighton manages a protected on-line group on Discord to assist new college students settle into the town.
Retention and alumni: Steady engagement post-admission
Your social content material assist shouldn’t finish when worldwide college students start their first yr or graduate. Create alumni teams that assist you be in contact with them after uni on networks like LinkedIn. It’s additionally price utilizing LinkedIn to retain present college students, by means of sharing recommendation content material and discovering methods to incorporate worldwide college students in content material methods. This has a double impact of enhancing retention while additionally showcasing the worldwide scholar expertise to potential college students.
Use these teams to share information about alumni occasions and to encourage new content material from profitable alumni college students that may encourage the following era. By leveraging your alumni community, you’ll be able to create a snowball impact that retains your social content material related and extra impactful over time.
How you can differentiate worldwide scholar recruitment campaigns by social community
An efficient worldwide scholar recruitment technique entails selecting your platforms. Since not each social community is accessible in each nation, tailor your selections to the nations you’re recruiting from. That is notably vital in the event you’re recruiting from China, which has its personal group of well-liked platforms, corresponding to WeChat and RedNote (Xiaohongshu), amongst others.
In accordance with The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, Gen Z are most probably to have Instagram (89%), YouTube (84%) and TikTok (82%) profiles. These are a few of the most important channels you need to have in the event you’re recruiting internationally, as they continue to be well-liked throughout the US, Europe, Center East and different areas.
Instagram for worldwide scholar recruitment
Instagram is an efficient community for visual-driven content material, which makes it wonderful for displaying off what unilife is like on and off campus by means of model and scholar ambassador content material. Potential college students are additionally doubtless to make use of Instagram as a search engine, which means an optimised profile can get your college observed.
Some helpful approaches embody:
Embracing Reels: glimpses into campus life, and many others.
Scholar-led content material: a day within the lifetime of a world scholar
Constructing group: answering questions, showcasing golf equipment, and many others.
Visible storytelling: high quality photographs, cultural occasions, scholar societies, and many others.
Utilizing location tags and hashtags improves searchability and makes it clear the place your college relies, which might be useful for worldwide customers. Additionally benefit from actual scholar experiences. Take a look at how one can encourage present college students to movie POV guides or create social content material about your golf equipment, occasions and the tradition/actions in your metropolis.
Right here’s an instance from the College of Nottingham, the place considered one of their worldwide college students from Korea filmed a video that shares recommendation about shifting to the town.
YouTube for worldwide scholar recruitment
Alongside being the second largest search engine, YouTube is the proper place to share longer movies about your college. Common content material varieties that may enchantment to worldwide college students embody excursions (some UK universities are even experimenting with VR/AR excursions on the community), in addition to lectures and interviews with workers and worldwide scholar alumni.
To make your movies accessible, ensure you’re at all times optimising them for search and together with multi-language captions. In case your college is making an attempt to recruit from particular nations, think about making a regional account with content material that’s notably related to college students from that area.
YouTube content material ought to deal with what units your uni other than others—right here’s a preferred welcome video from Cambridge College, which has achieved over 2.6 million views. While it is a conventional tour-style piece of content material, Cambridge makes it distinctive by displaying the variety of its college areas and world-renowned options like their rowing workforce services.
TikTok for worldwide scholar recruitment
TikTok stays well-liked with youthful generations; the biggest demographic on the community is customers aged 18-35. That is the standard goal age group for undergraduate worldwide college students, which is why TikTok is turning into a vital place for these trying to appeal to college students from abroad.
POV-style recommendation movies and trending content material work notably nicely. Unibuddy discovered that 78% of potential college students discovered talking to present college students useful when selecting the place to review, so creating these conversations by means of TikTok Q&As may help along with your recruitment efforts. Make certain to work along with your current worldwide college students so you’ll be able to present these alternatives, whereas additionally creating related content material that potential college students will discover helpful.
As a comparatively newer community, TikTok additionally represents a major development alternative for UK universities. At the moment, only some establishments are utilizing it to its full benefit. Maybe the most effective instance is the College of Oxford, which has achieved nearly 750k followers because it began specializing in TikTok just a few years in the past.
LinkedIn for worldwide scholar recruitment
LinkedIn is an indispensable community for attracting mature college students and for holding in contact with alumni. Each LinkedIn messaging and advertisements can be utilized to advertise graduate packages in particular fields, that are important profession development alternatives.
It’s the best place to share profession success tales from prior college students, in addition to to share college or college awards. Reap the benefits of LinkedIn Teams to construct a powerful alumni group, who you’ll be able to faucet to create content material alongside you sooner or later. It’s additionally doable to create networking alternatives in your college students throughout LinkedIn with recruiters.
It’s also possible to promote occasions by means of your LinkedIn profile. Right here’s an instance from UCL, which hosted an unique alumni occasion for former college students who’re now based mostly in Boston or NYC.
Measuring ROI and optimising your social media for scholar recruitment
The one option to know for positive in the event you’re utilizing social media for scholar recruitment successfully is to measure your outcomes. Listed below are a number of methods you’ll be able to monitor and optimise your efficiency.
Set objectives and KPIs
Establish metrics which you could monitor to measure your success. Some frequent KPIs for worldwide scholar recruitment embody:
Engagement charges in your posts
Your attain
Variety of UGC posts generated
Click on-through charges (CTR)
Web site visitors
Leads generated by means of downloads or sign-ups
Began or accomplished purposes immediately from or influenced by social media
Mix these KPIs along with your extra recruitment objectives, just like the variety of worldwide college students you’re trying to recruit in a given yr. By combining each measurements, you’ll be able to maintain your social technique aligned to wider enterprise objectives and the general influence of your college.
Monitoring your key metrics also can assist you establish social campaigns to refine or reuse. The College of Sheffield launched its overarching worldwide scholar advertising technique, “We’re Worldwide”, in 2013, and continues to make use of its messaging as we speak to advertise inclusion and to draw new worldwide college students.
Implement hyperlink monitoring
By monitoring hyperlinks, you’ll be able to simply calculate key metrics like clicks and conversions, which present you which ones posts are influencing worldwide college students to interact immediately along with your college and even take the following step.
Use a instrument like Sproutlink to create a hyperlink in bio in your social profiles. Create extra tracked hyperlinks each time you’re linking to a sure web page, like occasions pages, admissions pages, course outlines and extra. By monitoring these hyperlinks, you’ll be able to see how nicely your general account is performing in direction of your recruitment objectives.
Use a social media administration instrument to observe and refine your methods
A social media administration instrument makes it simple to submit throughout your entire accounts, handle your social inbox, monitor the outcomes of your campaigns and extra.
By managing everyting social in a single place, your workforce can save time on guide activity and spend extra headspace on launching new artistic and focused campaigns. It’ll even be simpler to refine your campaigns over time by gathering historic and real-time information to match and analyze as wanted.
A number of UK universities depend on these instruments to assist all of their social advertising efforts, together with the College of Newcastle. They use Sprout Social to gasoline their full funnel social advertising technique. Right here’s a latest instance of how they’re persevering with to create social content material to recruit worldwide college students.
Join your social information to your entire journey
When you’re monitoring social information throughout your worldwide scholar recruitment advertising, join it with every stage of your candidates’ journeys.
With Sprout, you’ll be able to join your social information with CRM instruments like Salesforce and customer support instruments like Zendesk, so you’ll be able to centralise your entire information to get a full view of the worldwide scholar journey. You may additional rework your social information into social intelligence by integrating with Tableau, utilizing Sprout Listening and using Sprout’s AI capabilities to assist deep analyses.
Connecting your information helps you perceive not simply the info you’ve gathered, however the place it comes from, why it issues, what behaviors are being influenced and how one can adapt your socials to raised meet the person calls for you’ve uncovered.
Create a well-rounded worldwide scholar recruitment technique on socials
Recruiting worldwide college students by means of your social channels isn’t a static course of. It calls for a well-rounded strategy and a technique that evolves over time.
Preserve your establishment aggressive by adapting to present traits, and making use of the newest social advertising applied sciences worldwide college students are utilizing. Because the state of UK academia and the way we use digital platforms evolve, you’ll have to maintain experimenting with socials to remain related, and discover new methods of attracting and recruiting new college students.
Sprout gives tailor-made options for UK greater schooling organisations. Discover out extra by requesting a demo as we speak.
