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Social networking sites, primarily Facebook and MySpace, offer some interesting marketing possibilities for higher ed. But which sites to use, and in what ways? There are a number of choices out there. Facebook, MySpace and even LinkedIn are all possibilities. However, what’s the best strategy? If you’re talking about general recruitment, I would forget LinkedIn for your general undergraduate population. LinkedIn is a possibility for certain kinds of specialized masters-level programs that appeal to working people. But, in general, if you’re mainly interested in the undergraduate population, you need to look at Facebook or MySpace or both.

Part of the difference is demographics. The Facebook audience is a little more affluent, a little more male, a little better educated by family background. The MySpace crowd is somewhat the opposite…. To understand some of the reasoning behind this, one has to look at how these social frameworks evolved.

Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg whilst he was a student at Harvard, and spawned from him hacking into the administration records and sharing the student profiles across campus. He was told that it wasn’t possible, and he very quickly proved otherwise.

MySpace was hatched by the former ResponseBase team within Intermix, and thus the team had a strong background in direct e-mail marketing and CPA tactics. Once MySpace had acquired its first few million users, it could then rely on pure viral effects.

So, moving right along…

Ideally you need to pick an initial site that most closely fits the demographics you’re interested in, develop that, and see what happens. The most important thing in developing a site on [Facebook or MySpace] is not to close off the ability of people to respond and to add content directly to the site. For instance, Facebook has the “wall” where people can write comments. Some colleges and universities turn that off because they’re afraid that people will write not-nice things about them. If you’re going to do that, you might as well not do Facebook at all, because that goes against the whole grain of what a site like that is for.

Let’s think about the differences between recruiting traditional students straight out of high school, and targeting the more mature market (which is quite popular in the current economical climate).

According to the study by Pew Internet survey called Pew Internet on Adults and Social Media, 57 percent of adults from 25 to 34 maintain their own social networking sites, and 75 percent of adults 18 to 24 do. That’s essentially people still in college. But consider that 57 percent of adults from 25 to 34–that’s prime recruitment territory for adult students, masters programs, and things of that sort. That percentage is only going to go up. The percentage above age 34 goes down pretty quickly.

People in higher ed tend to gravitate more immediately to Facebook and look down their noses on MySpace somewhat. There’s information out there about the demographics of each group. You need to look at it and make a realistic decision about which one is best for you.

For the working professional, LinkedIn is a good source. It’s much smaller in terms of participants than MySpace or Facebook, but it’s an entirely different kind of site. It’s much bigger than Twitter right now, but I don’t know if it will stay that way…

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 5:12 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.