When interviewing for a job we tend to use a formal tone as that’s what interviews demand. We have our resume prepared listing our achievements, past successes, work history, as well as a few bulleted points of what makes us unique.
When we’re on a date (don’t worry, it’s been a while for me too) we approach conversation much differently. The interview strategy doesn’t work. The person sitting with you doesn’t care all that much about your college GPA and if you spoke to her in a rigid and formal tone it would be awkward. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you listed your accomplishments off during the entirety of the date, your chances of seeing this person again would be slim.
Think about the language used in both situations and how they contrast. When we communicate on the web I think it requires a balance of both an interviewing voice and dating voice, favoring the dating voice. Listing statistics and rankings is easy so that’s mostly what’s primarily communicated to our prospective students. Look what we have done, this is how we’re unique, and this is why you should care. The main issue with this is that when you communicate as if you’re interviewing, you’re not fostering connection. Connection becomes a ancillary goal because interviews are based on evaluation of credentials.
People know the hard facts about your institution. If they don’t they can find them on Google, your website, and on your print communications. So why do we need to keep reminding them? Why not show them why you’re known as a friendly campus instead of repeating the message and hoping it sticks, why not charm them with authentic and human stories unique to your institution that capture their attention, why not spend some time interacting with your audience as if it was a date and not an interview?
Here is a follow up to our post earlier this week about sharing your US News ranking via the social web, more specifically Facebook Pages. Here is a quick snapshot of the US News release from yesterday.
After the day, Joe decided to take a look at Top 100 National Universities according to the rankings and cross reference to Facebook Page wall posts.
Of these 100 schools, 37 posted on their wall about the rankings the day they came out. How were the results? An average of .9361% engagement on the updates.
To put that in perspective, if these schools would consistently get at level of engagement on each post, they’d all be in the Top 50 most engaging pages of our data that tracks over 1,400 Pages.
But if you know BlueFuego, you know we couldn’t stop there.
Next, we dove in and look at the Top 100 National Liberal Art Colleges. Here, only 17 of the 100 updated on the wall about their ranking, to the tune of an average 1.0124% engagement.
We have our opinions in why a lower amount of schools in the more prestigious category didn’t update regarding their ranking (eternal embargo from the top? ). But one thing is for sure…. data doesn’t lie.
We see it all the time in higher education, more specifically on Facebook Pages. A confusion of interests between 1) what the page administrator cares about or likes, and 2) what the audience cares about or likes. And as a result, both suffer.
You’ve probably heard us say it at a conference before: You are what you publish, and your institution is what you publish. You might think that your audience cares about your favorite TV show, an event in the area that you are passionate about, etc., but the majority of the time, the post falls on deaf ears.
Take for example the recent mini-meme within the higher ed web developer world of the venn diagram on XKCD. Through our monthly research of nearly 1,400 universities and colleges on Facebook, we saw several schools post this cartoon to their Facebook Page.
Average Engagement on the XKCD post = 0.025%.
Average Engagement on all other posts for the month = .1734%
Yes, a fourth of a percent of the audience responded with a comment or like, well below the average. In most cases, it fell on deaf ears, with no engagement at all. There’s a 594% difference in engagement between the XKCD post and the rest of the posts for the month.
US News Rankings
Let’s talk for a moment about US News Rankings, which were released today. A common sentiment between higher ed employees is that the rankings are flawed, irrelevant, and aren’t even worth a mention on the site or web presence. Heck, Brad’s even said it before. But… is it your interest, or the audience?
Now, take a look at this data of an event similar to the US News Rankings being released today. The Forbes 100, which were released earlier this month. Of the 100 schools on the list, 10 decided to update their Facebook community with the news of their ranking. How did it go with the community (the audience you should be serving)?
Principia College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .412%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .987%
Forbes Post Engagement: 4.064%
Washington & Jefferson: 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .312%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .594%
Forbes Post Engagement: 2.541%
Wofford College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .184%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .087%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.996%
Westmont College: 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .121%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .225%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.535%
Centre College (KY): 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .363%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .038%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.499%
Claremont McKenna:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .070%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .044%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.214%
Drew University: 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .114%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .324%
Forbes Post Engagement: .973%
Tufts University: 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .154%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .117%
Forbes Post Engagement: .715%
University of Virginia: 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .147%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .108%
Forbes Post Engagement: .426%
William & Mary: 2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .109%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .065%
Forbes Post Engagement: .204%
Wow. That’s some serious engagement. (We based engagement on the BlueFuego Formula.)
Final Thoughts
This is something that has been on our minds for quite awhile, as we continue to watch endless amounts of universities and colleges miss the mark with their updates.
Who is running your page? Are they even an effective communicator? Marketer? Or did they just happen to get there first? If you haven’t considered the fact that your Facebook Page/Presence is where most of your audience is having more touch points with your brand than ever before, and you haven’t yet thought about who’s running the Page and if they are truly a match to be communicating your messages and representing you, then it might be time to re-visit how you’re doing things. All it takes is one off-message post for someone to click hide and never hear from you again. The short-term agony of restructuring who’s involved has long-term implications for your brand and your institution.
While we are not advocating a restructuring that includes red-tape about who posts, what they post, getting approval, etc… we are advocating having the right person in place, people who understand the audience, to be representing you online.
Got a good ranking today? Post it to your online communities. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.
Posted by Brad, CEO
It’s hard to believe it’s been over 15 months since we initially pulled data on Social Web Callouts across 1,387 college and university websites in the USA. Just as a quick recap, here’s what the research consists of. We look at the .edu homepage, the Admissions undergraduate homepage and the Alumni homepage for the 1,387 schools (4,161 total URLs) each quarterly and manually pull the data on which pages have SWC’s, and what those SWC’s are.
Our 15-month review has continued to show some interesting trends in higher ed promotion of social web presences via the official website. Here is a quick recap, or feel free to skip down to the slidedeck below!
For the first time ever, more than 50% of all three areas include SWC’s on their site. Alumni leads the way with 60.4% of Alumni homepages including SWC’s on their site.
85.7% of schools (1,188) now have a SWC on one of the three pages we review. This is up from 20.5% (285) in March 2009. (We crossed into the majority around November 2009. Our research in August 2009 (562) found 40.5% of schools, and then 63.2% (877) in ?December 2009.)
More and more schools are including SWC’s on all three pages, which was not the case initially. In March 2009, only .07% of schools (10!) had SWC’s on the .edu homepage, the Admissions homepage and the Alumni Homepage. This suggests an increased web effort across platforms, but also the potential of an integrated presence/strategy between departments. Initially, we’d see 1 department of the three doing the web well. For example, Admissions would be using the social web heavily but Alumni wouldn’t be doing anything, or vice versa. We’re now seeing schools using these tools throughout the entire institution.
Admissions continues to lag behind in promoting their presences via SWC’s directly on their site. Our supplementary research with prospective students has shown that they are more likely to visit and join presences that are officially promoted by the institution.
Of the 769 institutions with SWC’s on their homepage, Facebook appears 96.1% of the time.
The presence of SWC’s has largely been fueled by standard template headers and footers across .edu sites. This typically means the entire site is linking to one presence, which is detrimental to each individual area’s efforts. For example, in March 2009 there wasn’t a single undergrad admissions site with a LinkedIn callout. Now, 62 schools do and LinkedIn appears over 8% of the time on the 735 admission homepages. This is due to LinkedIn being added to the global navigation, not because it’s becoming an effective or utilized tool for Admissions. Subsequently, we continue to see a lazy approach of deploying SWC’s across the site, which means the Facebook logo on an Admissions header/footer links to a Facebook Alumni Page, not the school’s Facebook Admissions Page. Targeted SWC’s are key to promotion.
Facebook is at it again. Literally overnight, Facebook Pages in Higher Ed have seen unprecedented growth out of nowhere. It started with a call from Scott Kilmer at Abilene Christian University, who noted that his page had grown from 12,500 likes to over 30,000 overnight. Joe from BlueFuego took a deeper glimpse into his research, the most comprehensive in the industry, showed that is not an isolated situation.
Last week I presented with Diane McDonald from Texas A&M about last year’s Race to 100K with LSU, and we talked about a potential Race to 200K.
Well, so much for that. Texas A&M isn’t even in the Top 5 anymore. Sadly, schools that have done much of nothing with their Facebook presence are now benefiting from what first appeared to be a glitch, but is looking less like that as the hours go on.
Here’s the previous Top 10 (as of 6/1) and the percentage they jumped overnight:
There’s not much rhyme or reason. TAMU grew 2.3%. The Ohio State University grew 250%. LSU saw a nice bump as well.
It’s easy for “experts” to look at a list of the largest pages and proclaim them as the best pages, but we know that Fans/Likes is only one metric of many to use when determining who’s truly doing it well. We’ll be releasing more about this through the summer.
Take a look below at the research and leave a comment with your thoughts on where Facebook has merged these Fans/Likes from, if they opted in, etc. We will later report how this will affect engagement with the BlueFuego Formula.
This blog will give you a look at the hottest in higher education marketing and recruitment and provide fuel for the Fuego at your school.
Ready to work with BlueFuego and make your web-based efforts work to meet your goals? Contact us today!
