Nothing is more disconcerting for someone raised in a pre-internet environment, where information was in books, newspapers, and magazines, and if you were feeling hi-tech, you might look at microfilm, than to watch today's pre-college generation (and younger) who don't know life without an iPod plugged in one ear and a web-enabled cell phone in the other perhaps with Bluetooth.
When I started my professional career in admissions back in 1993, the internet was in pre-web 1.0 days, and email was a new toy we were trying to understand. Students found out about my institution through our flashy brochures, snail mail we would send them, or profiles they would read about us in respected guidebooks. Of course friends and families' opinions oftentimes were (and still are) a significant factor in most students' eventual decisions as to where to attend college. But, we felt that if we got our information, the authoritative source, then we had a chance to get that student to at least apply, and perhaps enroll. We felt to a great extent that we were in control of our message, especially when it came to international students.
Today, that is clearly not the case. Prospective students looking at the US as a destination for their higher education have unlimited resources online in chat rooms, social networking sites, podcasts, YouTube videos, discussion forums, and numerous online advertisers claiming to have information on the best institutions. This explosion of informational access points has put, as Thomas Friedman asserts in The World Is Flat, the power squarely in the hands of the individual.
Colleges and universities, especially on the domestic admissions front, have seen the light and over the past few years have begun to adapt their strategies to explore new ways of reaching their prospective student market. A recent two-year comparative study at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth entitled "Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study" surveyed over 500 institutions in 2007 and again in 2008 to gauge the usage of social media in admission strategies. A couple highlights of the results:
- 61% of admissions departments using social networking in admissions
- 48% use video blogging
- 41% have an active admissions blog
Interestingly, the jump from 2007 to 2008, in terms of use of at least one form of social media, was from 61% to 85%. As it relates to future importance in admissions, 55% considered social media is "very important" while 89% of admissions departments feel that social media is at least "somewhat important" to their future strategy.
Through two recent, small snapshots of my own taken from online respondents (through a TWT Poll embedded in my last blog), and from a text poll done during a recent presentation to a state consortium group, overwhelmingly, the single most common area of familiarity and usage of social media tools among US international admissions representatives is social networking. In particular, Facebook is the tool of choice. Many institutions now have at least an organization page, and likely a group as well called "Future International Students of .... University" or "MU Class of 2009."
These new tools are great to have, but in order for them to be functional and attractive for prospective students, these pages need to be dynamic in terms of their content and conversations that occur. A focus group of student office workers can easily inform you as to what groups/organizations your students found most appealing and useful. Any one of them, and yes, even you, can create these group/organization pages on Facebook. Populate these groups with staff members and current international students, post some pictures and videos of recent events, and start a couple of discussion forum topics, and/or wall posts. If you have upcoming events, post them here. Message all your prospective or admitted students (depending on how large a group you want), and invite them to "join" the group or "become a fan" of your organization page.
If you are asking why Facebook, and why use Facebook for international audiences? Well, although the largest number of users in any country are in the US (it did start here after all), what most don't realize that as of April 2009, when Facebook broke the 200 million member barrier, over 70% of all members were outside the US. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 5th largest in the world, larger than Brazil. Interesting, if you wanted to place a banner ad on Facebook for your organization or group page (or institutional website), and you wanted to target university age students (17-25), say in Turkey, your audience would be over 5,320,000. A similar ad targeting your audience in India would reach 955,000. An important note here, a similar ad placed in February in India would have only reached 350,000. In both these countries and others, the numbers have been expanding dramatically in the last year. A couple of good online resources I would recommend for keeping up with social media changes are Nick Burcher and Mashable.com. You can follow both of these on Twitter to catch updates on potentially useful articles and tips.
That being said, just under half of the top countries sending to the US are top users of Facebook (bolded on second list), yet. From the Institute of International Education's Open Doors 2008 release:
- India
- China
- South Korea
- Japan
- Canada
- Taiwan
- Mexico
- Turkey
- Saudi Arabia
- Thailand
- Nepal
- Germany
- Vietnam
- United Kingdom
- Hong Kong
- Indonesia
- Brazil
- France
- Colombia
- Nigeria
For Facebook, as of April 2009, the top 20 countries by users are:
- US
- UK
- Canada
- Turkey
- France
- Italy
- Australia
- Colombia
- Chile
- Spain
- Argentina
- Venezuela
- Indonesia
- Sweden
- Denmark
- Belgium
- Mexico
- Norway
- Germany
- Hong Kong
With the exception of Hong Kong, Facebook has not really taken hold of university-age populations with the big dogs of East Asia (China, Korea, Japan & Taiwan) primarily because more established local social networks have already been dominant there. Nick Burcher (referenced earlier) has done some research on dominant social networks in countries in the Facebook top 20. For example, in much of Latin America Hi5 is a dominant player. Brazil is one of the most socially networked countries in the world, and Facebook is not in the top 3, Orkut is top of the heap. A recent Nielsen Survey revealed these results.
While establishing groups on other social networks can be useful, perhaps on Orkut (a Google social network) or Hi5, if you are targeting specific countries where those networks are highly traffiked may be useful, perhaps a more appropriate strategy may be to use banner advertising for your institution. Alternately, if you have very tech savvy international students who want to volunteer their time, ask them to manage a group on a social networking site popular in their home country.
Nonetheless, there is an additional synergy that can occur by utilizing Facebook for prospective students, as they can connect with a technology/social network that US university students are living on these days, make friends with current students on campus before they even arrive. As I experienced in my most recent position at Ball State, and had confirmed through anecdotal stories from EducationUSA advisers around the world that were active on Facebook, that students respond faster to Facebook messages than to email.
Over the past year or so, our network of EducationUSA advising centers around the world have begun to embrace Facebook group/organization pages. Later this year we will have a comprehensive resource available on a new EducationUSA web portal that lists the centers with Facebook groups. We also would like to assist those accredited US institutions who have social networking group/organization pages promote use of this tool. If your college or university has such a page on Facebook (or other social networks) specifically for international students please do send that group name to me for inclusion in this project.
In the meantime, I invite each of you to join our EducationUSA Facebook page (search for "EducationUSA" pictured top right here), and become fans, if you are not already. We will post upcoming events for US institutions to connect with the EducationUSA community.
No comments:
Post a Comment