Group items tagged

Social media isn’t the solution to the upcoming decreasing number of college applications. It’s not the solution for attracting the higher quality students. What it can be, is a strong spoke in your marketing wheel, but don’t try to convince your administration that it is a replacement for the things in your marketing mix you’re hearing prospective students are no longer interested in (viewbooks, CDs, etc.).

The only addition I’d throw into the fray is that schools could gain huge benefit by leveraging tools like Facebook to allow students to pull personalized content to their profiles. A current challenge with Facebook pages for schools is that students still have to access the institutional site to get specific information relative to their interests (outside of asking questions via facebook of course). An ability to deliver this to students in Facebook, empowers the student to get an even greater percentage of relevant content in a place they prefer.

It is a concept we’ve wrapped our heads around for a while. As a CRM provider for higher ed, that offers students a personal portal on a client site, we saw that we were able to personalize content to students, but one challenge with portals is getting students to return over an over. Sadly, you will lose some once the novelty runs its course. So, we’ve created a Facebook app that clients can put on their Facebook page. Students add it, and tell what their interests are. This adds the student to the institution’s CRM, and we can then push personalized content (events, academic information, key dates, etc) to the student; via email, our portal, and/or through Facebook.

I believe the central Web and/or marketing units of a university should also be the campus experts to create and maintain a strong and effective social media presence.

For most small- to mid-size universities, I think a tool like Facebook can be seen structurally as the university Web site. There is one main home page, otherwise known as a Fan Page on Facebook, for the university.