The Social Side of College Admissions

These past few weeks, Facebook has launched two major initiatives that can help colleges bring some of the Facebook experience to their own website. On June 24, Facebook rolled out the Live Stream Box, and followed that up with the July 8 introduction of the Fan Box. Both could be useful tools for colleges, in general, and admission offices specifically.

The Live Stream Box

You may have seen an early version of this if you visited CNN during Obama's inauguration. Facebook's Live Stream Box essentially creates a way for visitors to your website to comment back and forth in real-time. It seems best suited to allow your users to engage during a live event. Some ideas where this may be useful include a commencement speech, a live web chat by an admissions counselor, or an online broadcast of a college sporting event.

Some Benefits of the Live Stream Box

First off, the comments are in real-time and don't require page reloads. Secondly, Facebook is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. They are hosting the experience. You just have to drop a little code into your page. The system supported millions of users during the inauguration so it should be fine handling your events.

Finally, the biggest benefit is that comments users make in the Live Stream Box show up on their profile and in their friends' Facebook streams. And each of these comments includes a link back to your website.

Set-Up of the Live Stream Box

Facebook provides instructions for how to incorporate this feature into your website. Someone with some web expertise will likely need to be involved since it takes a little more than just copy-and-paste if you want to get the most out of it.

The Fan Box

Facebook's Fan Box helps you promote your Facebook Fan Page right on your own website. It gives you a way to bring these visitors into the conversation that is happening on Facebook. It also offers visitors a way to easily connect with your college or university as a fan.

Some Benefits of the Fan Box

First, the Fan Box enables users to become a fan of your Facebook Page without having to go to the main Facebook website. There is a Become a Fan option front and center. Second, you can show the Stream from your Fan Page. Visitors could read your latest Fan Page posts right from your admissions page. Finally, you can highlight the growing popularity of your Facebook Page. The Fan Box can display the number of fans your Page has and even some pictures of those fans. Nothing encourages people to join faster than seeing that others have already done so.

Set-Up of the Fan Box

Facebook has made it really easy to take advantage of the Fan Box feature. For Page admins, there will be an Add Fan Box to your site link under the profile picture. This will redirect you to a page where you can get some copy-and-paste code to drop into your own website.

If you want to learn more about these tools, you should check out these pages:

• Posting to the Stream in Real Time with the Live Stream Box
• Turning Website Visitors into Facebook Fans with the Fan Box

Labels: Community, Facebook, Public Profiles, Technology

Unlike the ethereal voice from Field of Dreams repeating "If you build it, they will come" to Ray Kinsella, your strategy for Facebook should not just stop when you create a Fan Page. That is just the first step in an iterative, evolving presence to establish a thriving community around your school.

Don't Just Recreate Your Admissions Website

If all you do with your Facebook Page is re-post content that is on your admissions website, you're missing a major opportunity. If all a student wants to learn about your college or university is the application deadline date or your admissions requirements, they'll go directly to your admissions website or they'll do a Google search and find it. I doubt their first thought is to turn to your Facebook Page. Don't waste a lot of space on your Facebook Page providing information that is easily accessible on your admissions website. Post a link to your admissions website so students who want to find this information can easily do so.

Don't Forget the Social in Social Networking

A Facebook Page should provide them a chance to make connections around your school, keep up with the latest happenings on campus, participate in conversations, and get their questions answered. These are all social activities.

Keep Them Coming Back for More

Just getting a Facebook user to become a fan of your Facebook Page should not be the end goal. You want them checking back periodically, building a relationship with your college or university, and, ultimately contributing to the community. Getting a user to become a fan should just be the first step in this process.

Take Advantage of the Hooks that Facebook Offers

Facebook gives you several mechanisms to re-engage fans of your Facebook Page. Understanding these mechanisms can help you make the most of your Facebook efforts.

Access to the Facebook Stream
When users become fans of your Facebook Page, your status updates (what you post in the box at the top of the page that says "What's on your mind?") show up in their Facebook Stream. The Facebook Stream is front and center on every user's homepage. It's the first thing they see when they log in. That's prime real estate to get your message out to your fans.

Notifications When People Reply to Comments
Make sure you allow fans to post on your Page's wall. If not, you are shutting off an avenue for them to interact with your school and you are losing an opportunity to get them to revisit the Page. When a fan posts a comment on your wall, they will receive notifications when others respond to that comment. It's like they're being given a little nudge to come back to your Facebook Page, and maybe even share another comment or respond to someone else's post.

Labels: Admissions, Facebook, Pages, Public Profiles

We're putting together a directory of college and university Facebook Pages. As a sneak peak, we've included the top 10 U.S. schools by fan count.

Drum roll, please...

10. The University of Oklahoma - 15,469 fans
9. University of California, Berkeley - 16,830 fans
8. West Virginia University - 18,490 fans
7. University of Florida - 20,087 fans
6. Indiana University - 33,490 fans
5. Stanford University - 36,719 fans
4. Texas A&M University - 36,907 fans
3. The Ohio State University - 37,611 fans
2. The University of Kansas - 43,898 fans
1. University of Michigan - 44,713 fans

The major athletic conferences are well-represented. All of these schools are in the Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-10, or SEC.

Please note: These figures are as of noon ET on June 8, 2009

Labels: Facebook, Pages, Public Profiles, Rankings

According to Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study, 61 percent of four-year colleges have a social networking presence. I definitely believe that social networking, specifically Facebook, is a golden marketing opportunity for colleges and grad schools. There are very few places where you can reach such a large population of prospective students without paying for that access.

Why Are You on Facebook?

However, having looked at dozens of Facebook pages (now Public Profiles) for colleges, I'm sometimes left wondering what their goals are. Creating a presence on a site like Facebook is not the end goal. It's a means to an end. You'll have a lot more success if you have a clear goal in mind.

Are you really getting much out of your experience? Do you have metrics in place to measure success? These are questions every admissions office should be asking regarding their Facebook presence.

Keep Your Facebook Presence Fresh and Focused

Creating a presence on a social networking site can seem very easy, but keeping it fresh and up-to-date can seem incredibly daunting. It may only take you 5 minutes to set up a group or create a Facebook page, but just being there is unlikely to provide much impact for you. The other end of the spectrum is to start pulling in feeds from all over the university, posting pictures, videos, and more with no clear strategy in mind. Again, you may not get much of an impact heading down this path either, except for creating a lot of work for you and your team.

How Do You Define Success on Facebook?

The task of maintaining and updating your social networking presence will become much more straightforward if you define some goals ahead of time.

Do you want it to be an outlet for news on campus?
Then pull in RSS feeds and monitor which stories generate clicks. Adapt the mix of stories based on this information. Create a mechanism for students, staff, and alumni to submit their own interesting news and events.

Do you want it to be a place for discussion regarding college admissions?
Then promote your Facebook presence in your admissions brochures, on your admissions homepage, and in your admissions e-mails. Encourage a few current students to be active in engaging and responding to prospective student questions. Divide up the task of checking your discussion boards and walls so that someone is monitoring activity and answering questions on at least a daily basis.

Do you want it to be a media center?
Then post videos and pictures from around your campus. You may want to start recording lectures from popular professors and upload these to Facebook. You may even want to encourage submissions by current students and alumni.

Let Your Facebook Strategy Lead the Way

Defining what you want your Facebook presence to be about may seem limiting, but it will actually end up feeling liberating. Once, you have a strategy in place and clear metrics for success. It will be much clearer for you and your colleagues what sort of content will help you achieve those goals and how you can put in place a process for keeping your Facebook presence engaging and fresh.

Labels: Facebook, Public Profiles, Strategy

Facebook recently made some major changes to their Pages (now called Public Profiles), which are profiles for organizations like colleges, businesses, music groups, and other celebrities. They've essentially made them more like personal profiles, giving the Wall greater prominence. This seems to be a response to the growing popularity of Twitter, which emphasizes quick snippets of information.

The Upside of the New Public Profiles

The major upside is that Public Profiles are given access to the Streams of its fans. That means that when you update the status of your college's Public Profile, it will show up on the homepage of your fans along with the status updates of that fan's friends. That gives your updates placement on prime real estate. The homepage is typically the first page Facebook users see when they log back in.

With this opportunity comes a new challenge&mdahs;relevancy. It is now more important to find the right balance between maintaining a relationship with the Fans of your Public Profile without "over-streaming". Whereas before Facebook allowed you to see more or less about a person or page on your feed, it is now an all-or-nothing deal. You are either part of their Stream or you are not. So if you start updating your status and posting items very frequently, you want to make sure that it is relevant to a good portion of your Fans or you may lose the main advantage of the new Facebook Public Profiles, placement in a user's Stream on their homepage.

Given that Fans of a college's Public Profile are a varied bunch, relevancy becomes particularly challenging. Do your alumni want the same updates as current students or even prospective students? What about fans of your sports teams? So what type of information should you be posting in the status of your Public Profile?

The Major Downside of the New Public Profiles

Facebook has drastically reduced the ability of organizations to present any sort of unique branding / unique feel in their Public Profiles. The Wall has become the most important feature and any Applications that were added have been relegated to their own tabs, off the main page of the Public Profile. It is now much more difficult to express what makes your school unique, to cater to the particular wants and needs of your Fans.

Labels: Facebook, Public Profiles