Bridging the Gap 2011 – The Importance of Your School’s Facebook Presence
Brian Simpson and Dan Zarrella, Expert Panel on Facebook
At the Bridging the Gap 2011 – Social Media Conference at Suffolk University, I was fortunate enough to listen to Dan Zarrella and Brian Simpson’s Expert Panel on Facebook. Zarrella is a Social Media Scientist and Inbound Marketing Manager at Hubspot. Simpson is the Director of Digital Media and Digital Social Hospitality at Vikram Chatwal Hotels. Though they don’t work in the higher education industry, everything they spoke about applies to your school’s presence on Facebook.
Having a presence on Facebook is no longer a choice. If you don’t establish an official presence for your school, someone else will. Facebook is about providing relevant, timely content and interacting regularly with people that “like” your school’s page (please note that this can vary by industry. For your school it is important to be interacting with your audience).
If you are wondering what kind of content you should be posting, please keep this in mind: Don’t post content you THINK people will like. You need to watch what is going on and listen to your audience. What are people asking for? If people are asking questions on your Facebook wall, that means there is a void of information. By listening to your audience, you will begin to see what kind of content they are looking for. Are a good number of students or graduates inquiring about job placement? Or maybe students are complaining about how the portal your school uses is far from being user friendly. Don’t get defensive… LISTEN! Listening is an ongoing task, not just something you do once a week.
Here are some tips for your school’s Facebook page:
-Unlink Facebook and Twitter. These are two completely different audiences.
-Facebook (and all other social media platforms) is earned, not bought like traditional media is. This gives Facebook more validity than paid advertising… people are choosing to join your community, it isn’t being thrown at them as traditional media is.
-Spelling on Facebook needs to be correct.
-It is important to get your internal staff excited and involved with your school’s Facebook presence. If these individuals are excited about it they will begin to grow your school’s Facebook presence and community simply by word of mouth.
Maybe Facebook won’t be around forever, but other social networking sites will be. By saying your school doesn’t have time for social media, you’re saying that your school doesn’t have time to listen to your prospective students, students, graduates, and overall community.
