The Used of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communication: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education

Colleges and universities are beginning to embrace social media and realizing the potential power and implications for using it as a component of their overall marketing mix.  Social media comprises of activities that involve socializing and networking online through words, pictures and videos. Some of the few social network are including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs and del.icio.us.

Facebook : Was originally launched in 2004 for Harvard students and then was expended to other Ivy League universities. It then expanded to other university students, high school student and others. Universities able to create an official Facebook presence for their university which able to include wall posts, discussion boards, photos, videos and many other application.

MySpace : Facebook surpass MySpace as the most popular social network. This can lead to unprofessional, amateur looking pages which can hurt a company's image if not done well. MySpace allows users to fully customize their profiles by completely changing the appearance, background and format their page

YouTube: The leader in online video. YouTube has given universities and colleges a platform to easily distribute videos to a much wider audience without any physical drive and postage to mail.

Flickr : Universities have found this social network to be a great tool to share photos with students, alumni, faculty and staff.

Twitter : People haven't found a definitive way to use Twitter for marketing in higher education. Some suggested it can be used in conjunction with other social media tools to serve as another tool to promote their new blog entries.

Blogs : Having currently enrolled students to blog about their lives on campus as a recruiting initiative in conjunction with admissions. Blogs are also being used by some colleges to post news articles to open conversations about them.

del.icio.us : One of the most beneficial ways some schools have found in using this tool is bookmark news articles about their universities throughout the Web to share with their audience.

There are some concerns when considering using or even embracing social media, which are

• Loss of control with negative comments
• Time commitment 
• Information overload
• Anyone can create an "official" account for the university

Social media offers advancement professionals a great opportunity for keeping in touch with alumni after they graduate.  Social networking can be a great resource for recruitment efforts, and could be beneficial to other program. However, they still believe the majority of your focus should be strengthening the experience  perspective  students have on your official Website.