Posted by Howard, Ignition Officer

With Tinychat.tv recently entering the live video streaming space, I thought it would be a great time to chime in with some thoughts on Tinychat.com and how it can be leveraged effectively to connect with students. We’ve been testing Tinychat for a while with clients and believe it can be a great tool to build relationship with prospective students.

Tinychat is an extremely simple video chat platform that allows up to 400 people to chat and 12 people to broadcast audio and video at once. The part that makes it truly “simple” is the login process. Users do not need to sign up for an account and can simply enter with a nickname or login with Twitter or Facebook Connect.

(Tinychat interface – Recent chat with some teammates from summer trip)

After Tinychat’s relaunch in May 2009, TinyChat has seen steady growth and has begun edging out Tokbox in unique traffic. Tinychat has been beating out Tokbox for one reason: the ease of use.

Now onto the fun part, how Tinychat can be used to reach students on the web. One way is to use student bloggers (or just students) and host a student panel through Tinychat. All they would need to do is login from their respective rooms and broadcast! A quick fan page post letting fans know it is going on can drive traffic to the session. The chat will be very organic compared to a regular, scheduled chat. The “impromptu” chats should prove to still be successful, as we’ve seen Facebook Fan Pages drive traffic well in the past. With Tinychat premium you can control who broadcasts, so that only your bloggers can broadcast while prospective students ask questions via text in chat. Another way is to have an admissions counselor do the exact same thing. Imagine being a prospective student with a question and having an e-mail back that says, “Do you just want to video chat? Talk with my at tinychat.com/(name).” Not only is it an opportunity to build relationship, but it gives a great human side to an admissions process that can seem very hostile to prospective students.
Another great perk of using Tinychat is that the users pretty much spread the word for you. When prospective students logon using Facebook Connect (as many do), Tinychat will publish to their Live Feed that they are currently chatting at X room. It looks like this:

Hope these ideas have helped start a good conversation on how Tinychat can be leveraged to connect with students; these are only the start of great ways Tinychat can be used. What do you think? Do you have any other ideas?

Notes:

Premium Membership details (may not be available with recent update):

Tinychat occasionally has audio problems and at times users have trouble getting their wecams connected. Make sure to plan ahead! If you have problems, Tinychat has great customer service: