This morning I attended a webinar: "Facebook and Twitter Recruitment Tools Engage Prospective Students," presented by Mike Richwalsky, Assistant Director of Public Affairs, Allegheny College. Althought he webinar was weighted on using these tools for marketing a college or university rather than instruction, I still got a good deal from it. Being in the LTC can be called upon by colleagues in UA departments and programs to help understand how to use social networking tools. As I've done a few other times now, I tweeted while listening to the speaker and following his slides.
Richwalsky began with a short overview of why higher edu should be using social media, sharing these four points: 1) Enhance your existing marketing, 2) Create or enhance your connection with your "customers," 3) Find new "customers" at a reduced cost, 4) Spread good news instantaneously. He gave examples a little later showing how Allegheny's Twitter site accepts replies and its Facebook site accepts comments. What is important is to treat these in a customer focused way and seize the opportunity to exchanging messages with the sender. He said if someone writes "your tuition costs too much" you can try to engage that student and could direct him to financial aid.
As in the last webinar I attended that was about a university YouTube channel, he pointed out that more people beyond the digital native age are using social networking. He provided a statistice from a Neilsen Group report showing the biggest increase in blog and social networking users came in the 35-49 age group. And he emphasized the importance of promoting your Facebook page on the college's homepage, adding links to print documents, adding "share this on Facebook" on every page on your website, and inviting students to participate in Allegheny College's Class of 2013 in their acceptance letter (after their deposit). He also showed how Allegheny had ushered students into Ning where they had "by invitation only." This seemed to be a good way to have your students away from the fraud merchants selling t-shirts.
Richwalsky described a sort of social networking pyramid in which the foundation is the institution's website, and the sub-floor is the blogging. A few other points he made about Twitter is that it lets you broadcast news (often good news) immediately. He cautions that when you get started you need to understand that there is a big time commitment to using Twitter. It is also important when you are starting to use Twitter, to think about who your intended audience is.
Turning to Facebook, Richwalsky said that Facebook has the most options for our schools. You can create personal profiles, use different applications, create groups, fan pages, includes ads and photos/videos. He spent a good bit of time talking about how you can have "fans" of your site. I think an important point is to you can collect data from your fan pages. For Allegheny, its 2,000 fans are 63% female and 42% are 25-34 year-olds. Other points about fan pages: 1) users can post questions and share info, 2) you can add applications to your fan page, 3) you can send an update to all your fans at once (and target these), and 4) multiple people can be admins.
Richwalsky provided a good deal of useful recommendations on how to make your fan pages engaging to students. He recommends: 1) allowing wall posts, sharing photos and comments, 2) posting on your own wall and telling people what's going on 3) posting photos, videos, events and more to generate conversation, and 4) being a part of the conversation, especially answering questions from prospective students.
Both these social networking resources offer colleges and universities enormous opportunities. Let me know if you have ideas on how we can help UA colleagues in departments or programs with Twitter or Facebook. (UA Communications provides the public Twitter and Facebook sites)
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