Are you using your university Facebook page in an effective and fruitful way?

Is Facebook something which is only useful as a marketing tool to attract new students or might it have a more significant role play? And rather than a one-way marketing channel, might it facilitate discussions and debate? Might Facebook prove useful for internal discussions as well as engaging with new students? It’s been years since universities started to create pages on Facebook for the first time, but are they managing them well?

Truth is that universities still have a way to go to ensure that their social media presence is seen as a credible source of information for prospective students. While Facebook posts are unlikely to be the sole reason for choosing a particular university, a positive, responsive and relevant social media presence does have the potential to cover prospective students into enrolled students. Social media are useful at different stages of the application process. A prospective student may not use social media for initial research, but may engage with social media to help finalise their decision.

Universities should be looking at social media content as part of a wider immensive and rounded experience for prospective students, and should think about how much of the information they are pushing out is relevant to new or potential students. The key is to integrate a range of activities including traditional media and print, web-based information, events and activities and social media throughout all stages of the recruitment process. The trick is to get the balance right and to be ever close to, and responsive to, prospective student needs.

Cardiff University’s Facebook page appear to be positive about the benefits that the platform can provide:

If we take a look at European universities, the ones based in the United Kingdom are by far outperforming other countries in communicating via social media. More than 60% of all university twitter followers are connected to UK institutions. They also account for 42,4% of all Facebook members. The University of Oxford dominates Facebook and is growing at a great velocity of around 2.000 members every month. Despite some effort by Dutch universities to catch up with this trend, none of them manage to place in the Top 10.

Numbers are in fans on Facebook

Many universities create Facebook pages and twitter channels, but in the end they do not know what to do with them. Some are simply copying news they publish on their regular homepage. More than 65% of the social media channels in Europe focus on offering customer services to students. Understanding Facebook and the like as a mean for actively sharing knowledge and initiating discussions is very rare. Having a closer look at how universities from different European countries perform in communicating via Facebook, it is easy to see that Great Britain dominates the ranking.

Numbers are in fans on Facebook

Instead of focusing their attention on promoting information to mainstream media, some university public affairs offices are using the power of social media to engage the community directly. Universities are constantly exploring new ways to use social media to fulfill their missions of engaging and sharing knowledge with their constituents. But do you know how to approach the students and build a full operative and effective Facebook page? Here are some tips and examples of successful actions that some American and European universities accomplished:

• Gathering and sharing information.

Perhaps the most common way, and the way in which most of us use social media, is sharing information about ourselves or things we find interesting. Because universities are educational institutions, they use social media to highlight their experts, as well as the resources they make available to the public.

• Showcasing student and faculty work.

That can be as simple as featuring photos taken by students through a photo album as the Stanford University did in their Facebook page, which boasts 38,000 fans. Or it can take the form of an elaborate Youtube rap video a par of Stanford students created for a biology class assignment that was shared on multiple social media channels:

• Providing a platform to broadcast events.

Rather than just use social media to promote specific events, some universities employ the tools to provide a place for the university community to engage and participate in the event as it’s happening. Stockholm University in Sweden provided a live streaming video on its website for those who could not attend a seminar on environmental issues and another on file sharing.

• Producing, not just promoting

In the past universities would only target traditional media outlets, but now they are using social media to better target journalists and non-traditional media, such as blogs. Further, beyond simply relying on a news organization to pick a story up, universities are using social media as a publishing tool to connect directly to their audiences. The University of Georgia is using their facebook page as a publishing tool as well. Many of their links get comments, criticisms and inspire a conversation on the topic.

• Creating a dialogue and communicating to students

During school year, the University of Texas hosted student blogs called “Longhorn Confidential” in which two students from each grade level blogged about their experiences at school. The public could respond to each post via comments, and often did. It served as not only a story-telling format, but created dialogue as well.

Learn how admissions officers are using Facebook to recruit prospective students