Target Your Facebook Updates
If you don’t have a Facebook fan page for your institution, you should. Stop reading this, go make one, and then come back. I’ll wait.
For those of us who do manage our institution fan pages on Facebook, I noticed a new feature yesterday when I wanted to send an update to our “fans.” I see that you can now target those updates to a specific demographic. Here’s a screencap of the menu:
I think this opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities for us - we can now target alumni specifically or current students. You can also just target a specific geographical area. Very interesting.
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Content and Community
There’s so much talk in higher ed circles about social networks, and whether or not to build your own, or use Facebook, or use a vendor and it’s not just the admissions side but the alumni side as well. Every platform and vendor solution has their bells and whistles, feature sets, RSS, friending, badges and all that.
Sometimes, I think it’s important to step back and remember that you can have the best built, most feature-rich social network but without the compelling, interesting content, the site is useless. People will stop coming and your project will be a failure. I’m guilty of this - focusing on the materials used to create content, like blogs, the cloud, HD cameras, and forgetting that without great content, it doesn’t matter how great it looks. If the content stinks, no one will care.
I’ve blogged here about Gary Vaynerchuk. He has nothing to do with higher ed at all - in fact, he has a video podcast about wine. But his thoughts on social networks and communities make total sense for us in higher ed.
Forward this along to your director of admissions or alumni. Not to say “you’re doing it wrong,” but to get them to remember that in the end, our jobs are about selling our institutions and our programs and all the ways our schools are special, and not about the fancy website feature.
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College Connection Interview is Up
As I mentioned yesterday, my interview with College Connection is now live. You can hear it here.
My bit starts about five minutes in. I hope I don’t sound too much like an idiot.
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