Social Media for Higher Education

I wrote this yesterday from Rochester, New York, where I was attending my alma mater‘s homecoming reuinion weekend. It’s given me pause to consider the implications of social media for institutions of higher education, most significantly as multidimensional tools for recruitment and growth.

In a traditional, one dimensional sense, social media tools provide yet another channel for schools to broadcast their promotional messaging to prospective students. Social networks, Facebook in particular, represent the greatest concentration of high school students online. Advertising within Facebook is a no brainer.

Leveraging the relationship-building tools that social networks and other platforms provide adds a second dimension to the promotional opportunities available to colleges and universities. Creating a Facebook Page (like the one pictured), for instance, allows prospective students to receive timely and relevant information from schools in a setting that they are familiar and comfortable with. In addition to the one-dimensional mass-marketing approach, schools can interact directly with prospective students through messaging, discussion forums, and other media.

Finally, the third dimension consists of establishing not just one-to-one or one-to-many relationships with prospective students, but truly enabling a community built around the school. Through social media, schools can build a network of prospective students, current students, and alumni who are able to carry on a public dialogue with one another directly. This is win-win-win-win: prospective students get their questions answered and the “real deal” about schools they’re looking at, current students can offer advice to future classes as well as connect with alumni to learn about job opportunities, alumni can tap directly into a pool of current students for recruiting purposes, and of course the school itself benefits from every conversation and interaction that takes place within the community.

I’m proud to say that the University of Rochester is farther along than many schools when it comes to using social media for recruitment. There’s already a U of R Facebook Page, and a community like the one I just describe has begun to grow up around it. It’s a great start, and sets and example that I hope many other institutions of higher education take notice of and resolve to follow.

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