Jun 25th 10 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Featured Articles, Strategic Creative

5 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media for Graduate Recruiting

1. Your students need community. Traditional-age undergraduate students are surrounded by a recruiting community; from high school visits to college fairs and campus visits, they find support, reinforcement, and people just like them. For the most part, graduate and adult students are more isolated throughout the recruiting process because of who they are—older, working adults for example—and because many graduate admissions programs do not have the same resources their undergraduate counterparts enjoy (although they are asked to contribute). Additionally, the focus on graduate recruiting has only blossomed in the last several years and does not have the same systems available. While social media is not a cure-all, it can certainly help by providing online community space for these students.
2. Your funnel is 24-7. Unlike the undergraduate recruiting funnel with its clearly defined inquiry, prospect, and app phases, the recruiting pipeline for graduate programs runs 18–24 months from inquiry to enrollment. In many ways, you are always recruiting. Graduate schools aren’t good at cultivating relationships—again, this is a resource issue—and they’re either impatient or not focused soon enough, often waiting until students’ test results come in (GMAT, etc.). By this time, stealth applicants have already turned in applications. Social media enables you and your prospective students to forge connections and build relationships early on in the recruiting process.
3. Social media can sell your program better than you can. The campus experience is important to prospective graduate and adult students. It’s often hard to tell just what that experience will be like from the descriptions in your prospectus or brochure. Above all, what many students want to know is: what is the classroom experience like? For example, just what does the Socratic method of teaching law look and feel like? A YouTube video of one of your best professors in action might help demonstrate it.
4. Social media can help you keep graduate and adult students. You lose students for a number of reasons, but two of the most prominent can be communication and support. Again, due to tight resources it’s difficult to give graduate and adult students the information they need when they need it. With its unique ability to provide real-time content, social media can serve as an information resource and dispeller of myths and misinformation. Here, your community can help guide students… and by having a constant source of available guidance, your students will have an extra layer of support that just might make a difference. Additionally, social media can help you connect students to outcomes, a key selling point and the reason they’ve enrolled in the first place. For example, LinkedIn is a thriving professional social network where many graduate students are forming interesting groups and discussions, like the Asian MBA Association.
5. Your students are the right age. Recent research from the Pew Internet foundation tells us that older users make up the largest group to join Facebook in the last 3–4 years. Some key findings:

• • Share of adult internet users on social networks quadrupled in the past four years—from 8% in 2005 to 35% now
  • Adults make up a larger portion of US population than teens—the 35% number represents larger number than 65% of online teens
  • Younger online adults are more likely than older adults to use social networks—75% of adults 18–24 compared to 7% of adults 65 and older

In my next post, I’m going to talk about strategies and tactics and what some graduate and adult programs are doing.

In the meantime, tell me about what social media initiatives or strategies you’re working on.

PS: Join me and my colleagues at SIM Tech 2010, www.stamats.com/simtech2010!

Photo by Anne Helmond