Social media is becoming a must-do activity to generate prospects, nurture them through the admissions process and convert them into enrolled students.
In the past, the admissions department worked with the marketing team to create a set of collateral, e.g. catalog, mini-brochures, post card mailers, etc. Today, the admissions department requires a constant stream of fresh, relevant, authentic and engaging content to interact with students via various digital social media channels. Content for Twitter is different than content for Facebook. Recruiting students through international marketing efforts with different language and platform requirements requires another skill set all together.
Your challenge: more content creation requires budget, skills, time and ideas.
Here is the connection to your new friends. The walls between admissions, marketing, public relations, alumni relations, student services and academic staff need to be shattered or at least breached so that all can benefit from “content favors."
The admissions staff is responsible for: attracting and identifying suitable students with sufficient financial means and yield a pool of students corresponding to your college’s academic profile and market position.
Yet you need help to create fresh and compelling content that reflects the activity, excitement and attraction of your institution. Universities with active sports teams are very capable of creating relevant, compelling and fresh content and are able to hold the attention of their students and alumni. We can show the impact: Intead Insights:Social Media Klout Score.
Imagine if your new friends around campus can help you with one or two interesting little content creations per semester. Marketing and alumni relations should be able to deliver that volume per month, but even faculty should feel obliged as a friend to send you these one or two content updates per semester.
Maybe you'll provide an online lecture example from your faculty. Here is an example of a whole class produced with low-budget video recordings: Marginal University Lecture Example
Video creation, screen casts, and short interesting news blurbs need to become second nature to the university community. The “friendship burden” should be small for each friend and you can sustain the effort forever.
And I didn’t mention a group that can be leveraged even more – since they already produce digital content more than you could ever use – your current students.
In general, healthy universities consist of highly engaged and connected communities. Social media challenges these communities to reflect this engagement to a greater extent to prospective students and their parents. In marketing lingo, the community is the basis for inbound marketing, while the admissions department is your outbound sales group. As in so many other industries, sales groups are getting weaker and consumers are forming their views and rely much more on authentic and more credible inbound marketing information. It takes a village to raise and educate a child. It takes the whole university community to attract the next generation of students.
