U.S. Colleges & Universities: Join EducationUSA on YouTube

 If there has been an important social media lesson learned over the past year, it would be that one size does not fit all.  With EducationUSA we realize that there are many different audiences that we attract to our website, to our different Twitter feeds, our Facebook fan pages, this blog, and our YouTube presence wanting different information in a variety of formats. Information, particularly for our prospective students, needs to be of an interactive nature and visual oriented wherever possible.

To that end, we have been collecting a series of videos produced by our advising centers abroad and others that would be attractive to potential students looking to come to the United States for study.  As we grow our EducationUSA YouTube channel, and hope to work more closely with all accredited U.S. colleges and universities looking to reach out to international students, we are offering a free opportunity to partner with EducationUSA to enhance your international recruitment efforts.

For your institutions to have either existing or future campus videos displayed as "Favorites" on our EducationUSA YouTube Channel, you are welcome to email Marty Bennett, EducationUSA Marketing Coordinator, the url address (from YouTube) for institutional promotional videos, interviews with international students, international office personnel, or other related videos.  If you have videos but have not created a channel on or made use of YouTube, it is a free service.  The only requirements for posting videos to YouTube is that they be less than 10 minutes long, and smaller than 100MB in size.  In submitting these url addresses to us for linking to our YouTube channel, we would ask that you provide in the email, a statement that consent rights of the individuals highlighted in the clip for use on your institution's behalf online have been secured, and could be made available should the need arise.

As more and more U.S. colleges and universities get their heads around how best to use various social media outlets to reach international (as well as domestic) audiences, we hope you can join us in this effort.  Many campuses now have either their own YouTube channel or have taken advantage of YouTube.edu options that allow their institutions to showcase all sorts of related videos on campus life, lectures, events, as well as admissions-related content.  By partnering with us, your institution will be able to reach a larger audience of potential students that may be attracted by what your campus has to offer them.

Deadline for Submissions:  January 29, 2010.  We hope that with enough submissions by that date, we can go live with this Playlist on our YouTube Channel by early February.