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.