Keeping up with Facebook in Higher Ed

We were recently at F8 where Facebook announced a bunch of new innovations, including Community Pages.

In the beginning, there were Courses. Then, there were Groups. Facebook Applications were introduced in May of 2007, they deleted Courses, then introduced Pages about six months later. Soon, you could add apps to Pages. Now, there are Community Pages, which can also be “liked” just like Fan Pages, which you could no longer Fan as of April 2010 but can only “like” as well….. Confused, so are most of the 500 million users.

As the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, Community Pages popping up, with no way to grab them or control them, is just another example of how Facebook doesn’t care about institutional customers. They are trying to eat the internet, with a focus on search and wikipedia. They’re taking advantage of most marketers trying to distinguish and control their brand on Facebook. This shouldn’t be news, though. In addition to discussion how Facebook is a limited tool in Higher Ed, I talked about why Facebook ignores it’s customers a while ago. It’s strategic in the technology adoption “tornado.”

The Game is rigged. Facebook has you spend time and money promoting your presence on that platform to users of their platform. Of course they’re going to make that take more clicks and cost more money in the short run. While they’re the only game in town, it only benefits them.

The best way to differentiate yourself from the confusion, in our opinion, is to introduce a Facebook Application for your College or University. It’s a comprehensive and coordinated presence for your school. There’s only one, and once you promote it there’s enough in there to get users coming back. At Inigral, we’ve designed Schools on Facebook, our white-label application, as a social network for student yield and retention and are building it into the first true Lifecycle Engagement Platform.

Please check out our Webinar Series if you’d like to learn more….