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.



I believe, rather than diving in, as Oxford appears to have done, it is important to take a step back and define your institution's objectives for Facebook first. For example, I suggest you consider the following points before launching a Facebook page for your University:

• Why should someone "like" your page? What's the page going to provide? Will it be a key platform to broadcast your University's prospective student events programme? Will it be more focused on providing info to current students on upcoming on campus events?
•   How are you going to maintain content on your page? Broadcasting is not enough, you need to listen to your Facebook audience and respond to trending topics. In my experience what makes the most practical sense is if several people have editing and updating rights to keep content up to data and to facilitate monitoring generally. If multiple people are going to maintain a page however, you need to have guidelines in place on what to do if for example inappropriate content is posted on your page etc.
• What are the goals of your page? How do you measure success? If you are planning to engage with your student or prospective student base then typically page interactions will be a key measure of success on your page. Facebook Insights is a great tool to measure page interactions and other metrics on your page.

 Secondly, once you have outlined your objectives, I suggest you explore what custom features on Facebook would assist your page.

• Don't just settle with a standard page with say a Wall, Info, Boxes and some photos, make the most of the features that allow customisation of your Facebook page. See John Haydon's article on key customisation features for more info.
• Some key features that are not utilised enough in the education sector include;
• restricting posts to your page to only those who "like" your page, to boost "like" growth,
• embedding tabs from facebook into other communications e.g. email.
• Improving tab layout e.g. by removing unused tabs, setting a relevant entry page etc.
• creating a custom URL for your page

Finally, make the most of Facebook pages "killer" tool - custom landing page to really get across your core page objectives.

Facebook allows you to add a custom page tab which can be created using HTML to feature whatever content you wish via insertion of a FMBL application. For full information of how to insert a FMBL into your page and create custom content see Mike Richwalsky's comprehensive article on this.

There are some excellent examples of Universities making use of custom pages to help tailor their page to promote key messages. Here are some examples:

1. Open University: Their custom landing page has a campaigning focus highlighting part time students and their role in the higher education funding debate.
2. University of London International Programmes: Their custom landing page called "Course Updates" provides a platform for academics to respond to the latest trending topics on Facebook, helping assist ongoing student retention.
3. Kaplan University: Their page has a number of custom tabs primarily aimed at highlighting their events programme and schedule of webinars.
4.. University of Texas A&M: This is a page that tries to do a lot of things e.g. cater to current students prospective students and alumni and surprisingly their custom page manages to do this well. The page incorporates video content, highlights content available on other areas like iTunesU as well as promoting university merchandise in a remarkably clear manner.
5. Stanford University: This page is currently being used to encourage students past and present to share their stories online. It is a interesting example of how a page can be used to drive the production of user generated content that could be used for marketing purposes.

Overall, Facebook offers a great opportunity for universities to engage in a dialogue with prospective students, current students and alumni in a way that can facilitate brand reputation, loyalty and retention. However, without a defined strategy for Facebook pages I feel it is unlikely an institution will be able to harness the full marketing potential that Facebook offers. I urge education marketeers to step back and consider their objectives before diving in.


Note: If you are in the process of creating a new Facebook page for your university, an excellent article on how to set up a Facebook page can be found on Squidoo.com.