Getting the best out of Twitter for education marketing

Does your University automate all of it's Twitter activity, for example using RSS feeds to provide a steady flow of content? Do you alternatively, link up your Facebook account with Twitter so you only need to update one platform regularly?

If you do, you're missing the opportunity to engage in conversation via Twitter and create dialogue with prospective and current students. You are also limiting the visibility of your content, as information tends to be searched for via hashtags on Twitter and content provided by feeds often does not include hashtags.

Using RSS feeds and particularly scheduling tweets definitely provides time saving benefits. However, I suggest that it is worth reviewing twitter on a weekly or at least bi-weekly and searching for topics of interest to your institution. For example, you could search for #MBA if you offer MBA courses. People's twitter posts around #MBA could provide you with ideas for twitter postings that could be of interest to your key audiences. 

Facebook email - what's the impact for education marketing?

The biggest digital  announcement last week was around Facebook's move into the world of email. The system is actually only in beta at the moment, so it's unclear what the full product offering will be, however Facebook has stated the following features will be included:

• Facebook users will be able to access a range of messaging formats in one place. The vision is that SMS and instant messages and email will all be accessible
• Facebook Messages will have a very high spam filter, creating what Facebook calls a "social inbox". You can set your privacy settings so your inbox treats messages from people who aren't your friends on Facebook as spam. Alternatively, all your non facebook friend emails will go into a folder called "Other".
• Messages will be more concise. Subject lines and CC and BC features will be stripped out in the new system.

Making the most of Facebook pages for education marketing

Most of us in education marketing are now using Facebook as a key part of our marketing strategy. The arguments for doing so are pretty obvious:

A. Amazing reach 500 million users worldwide
B. The top social network of choice for 18-24 year olds globally
C. Fantastic targeting options allowing marketing messages to be highly relevant to users
D. Great opportunities to benefit from the viral element Facebook provides to gain even more reach amongst your target audience's social graph.

However, I feel often Universities decide to create a Facebook presence before actually deciding what their objectives for using the channel should be. I believe a good example of a University who appear to have dived into Facebook with no obvious strategy would be Oxford University. Though the university's page has just under 100,000 "likes", it only provides a wall, info, limited boxes and some photos. Oxford University appears to use the page primarily as a broadcast platform, rather than actively engaging in discourse with it's Facebook audience. As a result, I feel the page is a missed opportunity for the university to converse and listen and engage with it's online audience and further strengthen its brand reputation.

Is iTunes U the next essential step in University marketing?

The word that appears to be on most education marketing professionals lips at the moment is iTunes U. Whether you're a lover of it or slightly cautious of it, it's hard to sit on the fence - everyone's got a view! Also it can hardly be ignored as iTunes U has now come of age generating  global downloads 250 million this year.

Also there are some great success stories. For example; Open University's iTunes U channel is hugely popular. and it was the first institution to break the 20 million downloads threshold.  They point their success to providing content linked to current and popular OU courses. The channel allows students to incorporate content into their studies and others around the world can also tap into shared resources for free.

Reaching students internationally - one size doesn't fit all...

One question I get asked a lot is what's the best way to reach all our prospective students online?

This question isn't easily answered. In terms of reaching students around the world a "one size fits all" approach is never going to be the way of best reaching people. Higher education marketing teams need to be sensitive about local trends and subtle differences in technology adoption within key regions.

For example Asia is a key area targeted by western universities. The region's growing population and increasing economic wealth makes it an ideal target for student recruitment.What higher education recruiters need to ensure they bear in mind however, is that a single advertising strategy leveraging digital and other marketing platforms across the region will simply not reap results.

For example India is still dominated by print as a mass medium therefore relying on digital advertising to drive student recruitment alone would be doomed to failure.However, in Singapore video content usage is rocketing and a recruitment strategy that does not harness this fact is likely to be lacking in impact.

A large part of prospective students' time is often spent utilising social media, but again a "one size fits all" approach, could lead to disaster. Facebook is the most visited social network in the world so no international marketing strategy with social media at its heart can ignore the network.There are regional differences, however to bear in mind. We can see that Orkut is the dominant social media platform in India but new platforms such as voice social network Bubbly is growing rapidly.

Don't forget the niche market differences in order to maximise your recruitment strategy's success!