Are you being followed?
Jul. 10, 2010 at 04:26 PM | By Kate Malone | Comment Count
The University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research recently released the results of their third annual survey on social media in college admissions. Research continues to show that social media adoption at four year colleges and universities is outpacing that of Fortune 500 companies. Trends indicate that awareness and engagement in social media in admissions has grown at a steady rate over the past three years.
When asked about their knowledge regarding several different social media tools, there was a huge jump in awareness from 2008 to now. The year, for the first time, admissions departments were asked about Twitter. Fifty-nine percent of the schools surveyed were using Twitter for constituent communications. This was the second most popular form of social media to use; the first was social networking.
However, research into how teenagers evaluate colleges has shown that they are more likely to use the college’s website over social media channels. Twitter in particular, sticks out as a tool heavily used by admissions teams, but not really consumed by their target audience. In this article, a director of marketing found that 40% of admissions departments used Twitter, but only 15% of students were engaged through Twitter.
Part of this is reflected in the fact that Twitter is mostly used by an older demographic- so while it may be essentially useless for a teenage audience, it may be more effective with adult learners. These studies underscore the need to keep track of how many prospects are visiting your various social media presences and report on the interactions taking place. With so many constraints on resources, small operations should need to make sure their time and money are being funneled into the right channels.
This report is definitely worth checking out- although some the research will probably just put into number what you already know, there are a few surprising findings. For example— higher education and charities have adopted blogs at a rate of over two times that of Fortune 500 companies.
