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.