Seven Social Media Strategies for College-Going Culture
Seven stellar strategies to safely and effectively maximize your organization’s college-connected goals through social media (blogs, wikis, social networks).
For all of the institutions we serve - CLIC Colleges, Communities (including financial aid programs) and Schools - if you discovered that nearly all of the students you are trying to help were gathered in a single location…would you go there? Or would you keep waiting for them to come find you?
Your students, our students, actually are in one place: online. More precisely, on social networks. Specifically, on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and now, we are happy to say, The CLIC. But you may not be sure exactly how to reach them online, when to use which tool, and how to do it all safely and effectively. So below are seven stellar strategies for maximizing your institution’s college-connected goals through social media.
- Learn the lexicon. Web 1.0, 2.0, 18.0? What’s the difference? It’s simple. Web 1.0 was about information. Just seeing someone else’s info on your computer screen was a revolution itself. Then Web 2.0 ushered in interactivity. The user now could affect the content on the computer screen - by uploading a video to YouTube or posting a comment on a blog. That exploded the amount of content online - and with Web 3.0, we now are able to aggregate all that content. Thanks to feeds, widgets and command central home pages (like The CLIC or NetVibes), Web 3.0 content is portable. It comes where we invite it, and we can add it to other desirable content in a location of our choosing.
- Make Web 2.0…Web You.0. You don’t have to try everything at once! A blog is a great solution if you have a focused message to share that you want students or community members to respond to (like this “CLIC with College” blog you’re reading). That’s why advisors all have blogs on our CLIC pages. A wiki is just a web site that any member can easily edit. So they are perfect for group projects (as on Wetpaint) or for interactive student and family tracking (PBWiki offers strong page-level privacy settings). And a social network is a great solution for letting your community rally around your organization’s mission and brand. But before you create your own network (using Ning, for instance), explore the popular networks that your students quite certainly already are on.
- Meet up on MySpace. If you serve fairly young students (up to 10th grade), chances are very good that they already are on MySpace. You can create a simple Web presence there in under five minutes and invite your students to be your “friends.” Don’t worry - they’ll be thrilled to friend you! You can upload video, add a logo, create a blog and more. And you can proactively keep up with your kids via their own MySpace posts and musings.
- Plan a program on Facebook. If your student population is 11th grade to college age, or you serve adults (parents, business people, etc.), you are in Facebook territory (age 35+ is their key growing population). Be sure to create a Facebook “Group” (as opposed to a personal page), and invite your students and community members to become your “fans.” When’s the best time to use Facebook? To plan an event! You can blast everyone in under five minutes, and they can help you organize, spread the word, and even post pictures, video and updates afterwards (if you allow it).
- Broadcast to your base on YouTube. If you haven’t already, search YouTube right now to see how many videos already are playing about your organization! Schools, trust that your marching band, athletic events, aca-decas and more are all posted and enthusiastically replied to, thanks to someone’s cell phone video camera. So take a moment to create a YouTube “Channel” for your organization, and in under five minutes, you can search for all of the video on the site that relates to your group and amass it on your channel’s home page. Consider having competitions for students to capture special events and post them to YouTube - don’t worry, they can’t add things to your channel themselves, but you can post the finalists and winning videos after everyone has voted!
- Microblog to your base with Twitter. Do not underestimate this new power player. Twitter lets users blast short text messages called “tweets” with minute-by-minute updates of what they’re doing. Tweets can be received on cell phones, in chat applications (like Skype) or online. If you want to test how popular and effective Twitter is, just ask a student to tweet your next football game, play-by-play, and see what kind of response you get! To get started, you can create a Twitter account in under one minute, then invite your students and community members to “follow” you.
- Modernize your college-going culture with The CLIC. Counselors, if you still post paper lists of scholarships for students who happen to drop by your office, imagine all of those scholarships feeding straight to their CLIC Student pages simply because their profiles say they’re eligible! Colleges, if you’re still buying mailing labels to send catalogs and posters to kids, you haven’t tried “splatting” to your target students in less than one minute from our dropdown menu of 40+ metrics. The CLIC has completely upended the old model of college prep by centralizing all of the invested players in one Web site (institutions, families and students) and letting the students finally be found by the resources who are looking for them. To get started, watch our welcome video and request a site-wide sign-up for all of your students. Be sure to start your own CLIC page, too, so your announcements, events and deadlines feed straight to your students’ pages! Your institution does not have to join for your kids to be instantly matched to colleges, cash and community programs to help them get into and through college - but definitely get your students signed up.
Here are some final considerations as you prepare your social media strategy:
First, all sites allow you to control who sees your page and what they can do with that information. For instance, on giant public networks, you may want to restrict who can see your page only to those you invite. Check your “profile” or “settings” links to establish this after talking to counsel - you’ll be impressed how extensive your privacy options actually are!
Second, the most powerful tool you need for all of these networks is an email list so you can invite people to join you there! If you don’t have a master student, parent and community email list, start capturing those today - and keep growing them at every event.
Third and finally, as overwhelmed or frightened or uncertain as you may feel about new media, it is not an option anymore to wait for the Internet and mobile media to go away. They are here, they are popular and they are fantastic tools that are fun, take little time to learn and cost no money to use. When is the last time you were offered a deal like that?
Still not sure you are ready to proceed? Let me close with these wonderful words from Gen. Eric Shinseki, the new chief of Veterans’ Affairs for the U.S.:
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
Come join the social media revolution - and what better place to start than right here on The CLIC? We’ll see you and your students inside.
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Achieve your college-going goals on The CLIC!
Please post your own social media successes below to help other organizations get up-to-date online!
DMA is the CEO of The CLIC, the revolutionary new site where students can powerfully plan for college and institutions can effortlessly recruit students from a single home page in our FREE interactive network. CLIC students can connect to college matches, scholarship searches, college access programs and the nation’s first master calendar of all college-related deadlines and events, with streaming video tips and much more, at www.theclic.net.
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Tags: blog, clic, facebook, internet, mobile, myspace, new media, online, plan for college, social media, social networks, twitter, wiki, youtube