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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
Inigral Receives Program-Related Investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Inigral Inc. announced today that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made a $2 million program-related investment (PRI) in the education technology company. Students use the application to obtain and share information about the academic and social environment at their school, as well as to find other students with similar interests, experiences or course loads and to organize face-to-face meetings.
The “Hook” of Social Networks and Social Media
People that post things on the internet for others to see are subject to the extraordinarily powerful force of positive, negative, or no feedback at all for an indefinite and infinite amount of time. This is the first time in human history that this is so, and frankly, our neurons are not wired to handle this kind of uncertainty. In fact, humans are highly motivated to seek out certainty and security in regards to social acceptance, inclusion, and praise.
You Already Spend Money on Social Media. A Lot of It.
In the CASE Social Media Survey released in July 2010, there’s a strong indication that you’re already spending a large sum of money at your institution on social media. 20% of institutions report between 6-10 full time staff work on social media, 6% report between 10-20, and 10% report more than 20 full time staff are working on social media.
Moving to Twitter Lists
Our team uses Twitter to curate the latest news from social media, new technology, and how it applies to higher education. And it’s great for keeping up with the top developments. But if you follow a lot of people it gets a tad unwieldy. So we’ve decided to leverage Twitter Lists to manage the workload more efficiently.
Facebook Page Admins: Changes to Page Width
Hey there friends. As one of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultants, we just received an update notifying us of upcoming design changes for all Facebook Pages. We wanted to bring this news to you hot off of the press. It specifically has to do with upcoming changes to a Page’s Width, along with new dashboard changes [...]
Taking an Objective Look at Social Media in the First Year Experience
The first year of college is when students determine how they fit within their school and ultimately whether or not they will continue to attend that school. Higher ed is also figuring out how to fit social media not only into their institution, but additionally to specific departments like First Year Experience. Despite FYE’s importance, resources and guidance using social media in this area is still scarce and remains untapped.
Inigral to Present at 3rd Annual Sloan Consortium Symposium
For the past year, Inigral has been working with the Maricopa Community Colleges District through deploying Schools on Facebook across their 10 campuses. What began with a pilot test at Estrella Mountain Community College and Scottsdale Community College has now expanded to three other colleges within the MCC district.
Higher Ed Increases Adoption of Social Media
Adopting social media and communicating with today’s youth has been a long-time challenge for everyone. But where does Higher Ed stand?
Deleting vs. Deactivating: A Comparison
“Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?” is the question Facebook asks everyone who is seeking to take a vacation from Facebook. Deactivating is the option Facebook gives users to make their name, photos, and profile invisible to Facebook the Facebook community. For instance, if Jake made comments on Jane’s wall, and later deactivated his account, the comments would still appear, but the author would be “Facebook User, ” instead of “Jake”.
Facebook Restricts Landing Tabs to “Authenticated Pages”
Earlier today, Facebook announced to the developer forum that Facebook Pages must have at least 10,000 fans in order to control which tab visitors see upon visiting their Page. For Colleges and Universities, there aren’t many institutions with over 10,ooo fans (learn more about the statistics of colleges with Facebook Fans here), this has a [...]
Three of the Biggest Factors in Student Retention are Social
Three of the top five institutional factors in student attrition are social in nature.
Admitted Student Social Networks: 8 Questions to Ask
An up-and-coming trend in college admissions is to adopt an Accepted Student Social Network. An Accepted Student Social Network, for those of you just getting on the bandwagon, is a private web community, often white-label, that accepted students enter in hopes of further connecting to their peers and, hopefully, to your institution.
Accepted and Enrolled Student Communities using Ning: No Longer Free, Never Was Good
Ning just announced they’re killing the free version of their niche social networks.
In the battle of Ning vs. Facebook, Facebook won bigtime. People are more interested in connecting with their friends than with niche communities…. Or, are they? Kind of….
Understanding the Power of Twitter
If you’re a Twitter hater, you might want to read this. I was a hater myself only a few months back. “I don’t have anything to Tweet about and I don’t care what others are Tweeting about” was my mentality. Funny thing is, I had — and still have — so many friends who shared my belief about Twitter’s uselessness.
Social Media for College Admissions Professionals: The Beginners Guide
Social Media is one of the most popular trends in higher education today, yet folks are still anxiety ridden. How much time should we be spending on social media? Who is doing it right? Who is doing it wrong? Are we missing something? Should we wait until the dust has settled to allocate budget to [...]
Social Media for Student Retention: Gates Foundation Hones In on Possiblities
The Gates Foundation has a goal of doubling the number of young people who earn a postsecondary degree or certificate with value in the marketplace by the time they reach age 26. Nick Punt, VP of Product, and I were honored to help shape the Gates Foundation’s thoughts on social media and degree completion at a meeting in Seattle on March 29, 2010.
2010 Facebook Facts and Figures
Uptime Monitoring company website-monitoring.com just released a detailed infographic on where Facebook has come from since 2004. Here are some highlights some highlights.
Student Clubs, Virtually: A Reply to an Inside Higher Ed Editorial
Community is one of the most influential factors to a student’s persistence at an institution, and has the largest effect (outside of financial reasons) on student retention as well.
Social Media and Student Retention: Can Schools App Move the Needle?
Having a social media interface to the instituiton is simply going to be a must have. And let’s be excited about it. The potential impact for student retention is huge. Here’s why.
Scale your Communications using Social Networking
In the past, you were limited by the amount of paper you could afford. Publications could only hold so much. Brochures and newsletters could only cover aspects of your institution that would be of interest to a large number of individuals.
Branding in Higher Ed: The Battle of Waterloo
Six months ago, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada began transitioning over to a new branding identity. Marketing surveys had shown that the University of Waterloo was perceived as a “regional” university despite having highly ranked Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics departments. The school needed to market their campus as a cutting-edge and competitive [...]
