How Will Facebook’s New Page Changes Affect Higher Ed?
According to Ad Age, Facebook will bring Timeline to Brand Pages by the end of this month. These changes will mimic the profile change announced at the F8 conference and although Facebook won’t comment on specific details, a spokesperson confirmed they plan on making Pages more consistent with Timeline by the end of February.
How High-School Students Use Mobile in Their College Search
Earlier this week Noel-Levitz released their series of e-expectation reports this one titlted “Mobile Browsing Behaviors and Expectations of College-Bound High School Students.” I thought I’d give a summary and some personal commentary on their key findings in regards to mobile/social behaviors. Mobile Browsing Behaviors Only 4% of high-school students report using a tablet device such [...]
Is Social Isolation a Problem on Today’s Campus?
If you’ve seen any of our presentations, we often quote the statistic “3 out of the top 5 reasons students drop out are social in nature” from the ACT 2004 study on What Works in Student Retention. Although statistics like these are important, they lack the personal story that affects students every year. Yesterday, I was shocked [...]
Mobile Resources in Higher Ed – From 101 to 2012
It seems like Mobile is the new marketing buzzword this year in Higher Ed. While social isn’t going away (and is nowhere close to being over), Higher Ed has rightfully begun perking up at new ideas to engage with today’s “Sobile” student. (hats off to Corie Martin for coining the Mobile + Social = “Sobile”) [...]
Tufts University Social Admissions Tips
Last week I had the opportunity to conduct a design interview with Daniel Greyson from Tufts university. Tufts has received national coverage in the past for their innovative use of social media in their admissions process. USA Today named Tufts as one of 20 colleges making best use of social media and in 2010 the New York Times covered [...]
Social Networking for Engagement and Retention
With all the recent talk about using social networking to increase student engagement on college campuses, schools are scrambling to find data to support spending time, money, and effort on implementing new strategies that involve tools such as Facebook and Twitter. Here is a collection of recent research.
The Team vs. The Technology
It’s 9 pm PST at the Inigral office. The engineering team is hard at work. Our marketing team still lingers, one working on an infographic and yours truly working on this post. The sales folks have left, but that’s only because they got in at 6 a.m. to reach the east coast. (way earlier than [...]
Is Your College Measuring What Matters in Social Media?
It’s not easy managing the growing number of online social outlets today. With limited time and shrinking budgets it’s important now more than ever for universities to be smart with their social media strategy. Prioritizing social media efforts begins with measuring activity and deciding what outlets have the best return on investment. In the fall [...]
Do prospective students use Facebook in their college search?
Last month, some students from Ohio University (who we’d been working with on a few social media related projects) gathered a group of high-schoolers for a focus group to learn more about the role social media played in their college search. The students asked a dozen high school juniors and seniors from Ohio the following [...]
Using Social Networking to Increase Student Retention
Selected Research on Social Networking from Emily Dalton Smith (Director of Student Engagement at ASU Online), and Michael Staton (CEO and Co-Founder of Inigral, Inc.). This was derived from a poster presentation that ASU and Inigral presented at Educause 2009.
10 Things to Ask Before Creating Another Facebook Page for Your University
Do you ever search for your school name on Facebook and get surprised at the number of search results that come back? I’m always amazed at the number of pages different universities have. From a Facebook Page for the Class of 2016 parents to a page for “parking and transportation offices” (who would like that?), [...]
Top 5 Reasons Why Students Join the Schools App (and why they don’t)
I love Facebook. Ever since my senior year of high-school when I received my .edu address from Ohio University, I was hooked on the connections and ideas that came from the social web. After working with colleges on social media strategy for the past few years, one of my biggest gripes is how they focus [...]
Is Facebook Spam Ruining your School’s Page or Group?
Recently (as you may or may not have seen) the Facebook news feeds have become filled with pornographic images, dead animals, and other disturbing images. Although phishing spam (links that entice you with catchy headlines and photos) are nothing new, the rate at which they are increasing has been making headlines this week.
3 Social Media Lessons from San Jacinto College
“We live in a real-time world and social media takes real effort from real people.” Earlier this week I had the privilege of speaking with two real people on the San Jacinto marketing team, who recently launched our product, the Schools App, last month at their college. Alyssa Webb is the Social Media Coordinator and Amanda [...]
Collaborative Social Media session at HighEdWeb 2011
UPDATE: Live voting is now open! Please follow the links below to choose the top social media wins, fails and wants in Higher Ed! Social Media Wins Social Media Fails Social Media Wants Original Blog Post continued below… Ever wonder how much collective time people have spent sitting through social media presentations the past few [...]
Secrets from the Inigral Design Team
I’ve worked at a lot of companies, but none that have impressed me more than the team at Inigral. I wanted to share with the higher ed. community an insider’s view on our design team’s process. Howard Kao is one of our lead product designers and Mike Petroff is an amazing client who acts as [...]
Friday Freestyle Via John and Ruby
Do you know what makes work great? Great people. You know what makes work even better? Great clients. Earlier today, one of our customers was getting an error as they tried to pull some data insights from our Schools App. When John was running into some issues, he creatively introduces himself and a screenshot of what’s going [...]
Recruiting International Students with Social Media
Early this morning I saw an article from The Times Higher Education UK that had quite a catchy title. International students ‘do not use Facebook to choose their university‘ It was a bold statement, although I’m not sure where/how the survey was conducted it makes for some interesting dialogue. The main statistic that led to [...]
5 Reasons Colleges Can Do Social Media Themselves
Last week I was on a call with the director of marketing at a college where he explained the trouble he was having managing the school’s “social media.” He stated he was interested in hiring a consultant or agency to help him manage the admissions/marketing presence and was thinking about drafting an RFP to pay someone [...]
Community College Retention by the Numbers
Arlene Arnsparger from the University of Texas walked attendees through the challenges of the student experience at community colleges in her presentation: Student Success: From the Starting Gate to the Finish Line Community College retention is a huge issue facing our country. While 90% of students genuinely believe they are motivated and prepared for their [...]
Social Media Adoption Research in Higher Ed.
In order to stay up to date with the latest research in higher ed. marketing, we’ve been diving into industry and academic reports to gather consensus around the current state of social media in higher ed. Yesterday, Nora Barns and Ava Lescault from The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, published their longitudinal study [...]
Admissions Marketing – What’s Here vs. What’s Next
For the past few weeks, I’ve been summarizing the 2011 Noel-Levitz marketing and student recruitment research that is extremely important to the higher ed market. After reviewing their reports last weeks our CEO, Michael Staton, pointed out something: Focusing on what is true today is not going to help schools position themselves to take advantage [...]
Online Expectations of Prospective College Students
Noel-Levitz just published more research on the current state of online expectations of prospective students and parents. We already covered a summary of best practices in recruitment and marketing trends here, but wanted to update a new blog to dive deeper into the digital aspects of the recruitment experience.
Using Current Students in College Marketing
According to best practices from the Noel Levitz 2011 Admissions Marketing Report using current students to engage with prospective students is one of the most effective ways to recruit students. We absolutely agree with these findings, and believe student connectedness and community is a vital part in the recruitment process.
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