According to a poll recently conducted by Intelliworks, Email is the preferred method to receive acceptance news from an institution. This research seems to have been surfaced almost simultaneously with Facebook’s decision to allow application developers to access email addresses of it’s users. And given it’s heritage catering to 18-24 year olds, it only makes sense that they accommodate email. The catch is that Facebook’s accommodation is only applicable to FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS, and not Facebook Pages and Groups.

After assessing this data, I began to wonder what does it mean for those of us trying to reach admitted students? Well, it certainly means that Facebook is NOT the ideal place for formal admissions communications, particularly acceptance news, or any “one-to-many” mass announcements. Facebook was built for informal communication — one-to-one personalized messages that university administrators send to make students feel unique, and peer-to-peer communication.

How does this mesh with the “household advice” of Facebook being a must have for every college admissions department? You know, you’ve heard it before:

Whatever you gotta do to get on Facebook, do it! It’s simple math, your audience is there + the cost is little to none = build a Facebook page or group for your school now!

By January 2010, the majority of the 4,300 colleges and universities in the US have taken this advice, and now have either a Facebook Page, or a Facebook Group (or multiple of each). And moreover, dozens to hundreds of these institutions have made Pages and Groups for teams, departments, or degree programs on campus, making the search for your institution’s “official Facebook presence” a nuisance. (Keep in mind that this doesn’t take into consideration the unofiicial Pages and Groups that get created by people unaffiliated with institutions but deceptively seeming to represent institutions.) This is one of many reasons that 2010 will be the year of Facebook Applications in higher ed. Pages and Groups simply don’t accommodate Higher Ed’s business needs.

We cover these issues and more, and more importantly, how to avoid them, during our webinar series Beyond Pages: Enhancing Facebook to Achieve Institution-Wide Results. Our next free webinar will be on Friday, February 5th, 2010, at 1pm EST, and will cover some recent developments we made to help your department make the most out of Facebook.