BrainStorm

At BrainGain we like to think we are bringing social media to the masses. We’re not trying to preach to the choir but instead we constantly look for new opportunities to educate and equip organizations on how to use social media effectively. Higher education is one area that we see huge opportunities for effective communications and marketing through social media. Here’s just one of many reasons why:


Higher education admissions (for the most part) is about attracting and enrolling talented individuals who often are still in high school.

This younger demographic (currently the Millennials) has adopted social media at an amazing rate. For the most part it’s a social requirement to have a Myspace and/or Facebook profile. Many of these students list their hobbies, interests, sports and extra-curricular activities and some even post their college choice wish list on their profiles. Savvy admissions recruiters should be “friending” talented individuals in the beginning of the admissions process or at least using social networking sites to find top flight recruits.

Admission blogs are becoming much more prevalent at higher eds. Schools like UVA and MIT are using blogs to tell their story to potential recruits. This tool humanizes a very scary process for both students and their parents. MIT’s admissions blog actually has posts from their alumni, faculty, current students and the director of admissions. My only recommendation would to get a parent’s perspective as well since a large portion of the admissions decision-making and research is done by mom and dad.

Blogger relations would also benefit college admissions recruiting. As I searched for college admissions blogs the majority of results are from individual bloggers acting as recruiting consultants and appear to be college neutral. Many parents and students seek the advice of non-biased third party sources to help make their school choice decision. Keeping these recruiting bloggers up to date and well informed about the achievements of your college or university is not only acceptable but welcomed.

Finally, as a former VP of Marketing at a Web Development company that did a number of website redesigns for Higher Eds I got a first hand view at how challenging the process of getting together all the various departmental, faculty, and staff silos can be. However, the college website is still by far the most important marketing tool for recruiting (well, maybe besides your athletics program). Having a professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professional come in and evaluate your current website and content strategy would be highly recommended. Search engines continue to provide free marketing to higher eds and the rest of us and in most cases search engine referrals outrank direct referrals. So having a SEO strategy can significantly increase the likelihood that people will find you in context to their recruitment search. Social media relations and marketing has a role in SEO. While I don’t have time to go into all the details (in this post) I’ll just say that the more blogs and websites link to your content the better chance you have in raising your placement around important keywords.

So in conclusion in a tough economy people tend to gravitate to getting MORE educated and college recruiting and admissions becomes a very competitive landscape. Using social media could be a differentiator in getting noticed and landing that top recruit.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under Youth Marketing, Talent Attraction, Social Media, blogs, Social Media PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.