Some business-minded folks would say yes, educational institutions, in essence, are companies. While understanding their rationale, being a recent college grad, and a user-focused marketer and developer forces me to disagree.

There’s a huge reason why Facebook Pages, Twitter Profiles, and their use of short bits of information will win. In today’s world of shrinking attention spans, where Americans intake over 34 GB of information a day, it’s an undoubtable value add to provide people with concise news updates about things they care about. Rather than reading an entire story, a 140-260 character summary allows a person to move on to other things, while keeping up with relevant news. Pages are great for this.

Pages were made for uniform audiences, not multi-faceted audiences

Pages and Twitter profiles are also great for broadcasting that brief update out to a large, uniform audience, like fans of Coca-Cola.  It is great for building awareness.  If you are a fan of Coca-Cola, you may want to be kept up to date on all things Coca-Cola. But, other than really liking another beverage that behemoth owns, you don’t really have a multi-faceted relationship with Coca-Cola.  You also don’t necessarily feel like you share a common experience and bond with other Coca-Cola fans, and you don’t want to use your shared bond to create new relationships with other soda fans.  The organizations that are satisfied with Facebook Pages are brands with a uniform audience, not a multi-faceted community.

Schools have community members, not customers

Prospective students, students, alumni, donors, and the community-at-large can be considered several things, of which “customer” is crudest of those options. Each institution wants to build a relationship with the various cohorts mentioned above, that will allow that person to feel like they belong to that institution’s family.  There are many attributes and experiences that go into this relationship and even more that go into that sense of belonging; activating the importance of that relationship is less about “communications” and more about building “community.”  This is what makes the undecided prospective student decide to attend your institution; this is what makes the struggling student decide to stay at your institution; this is what makes the recent grad donate their first $20.03 in honor of their graduation year to your institution: not a broadcast relationship but a sense of belonging.