Social Media & Reputation Management for the Education Industry

Online marketing is a constantly changing landscape and social media has been a big part of this in the past few years. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and several others have all become the norm for anybody trying to be involved with social media marketing. The education industry has started to tap into this market realizing they can send their message out to a targeted audience. Several schools are still hesitant to get involved in social media for a variety of reasons (not enough time, can’t measure results, doesn’t fit with their current marketing campaign, etc) but the one I hear the most is a fear of their reputation becoming tarnished. With the ability for users to generate their own content and comments this Is a very real fear but shouldn’t be a cause to stay away from social media, it should actually be a cause to get involved in social media.


Social Media Should Be Proactive not Reactive
A lot of schools don’t worry about managing their reputation until it becomes such a glaring issue they are forced to. They might not have known about it until they see their name in the newspaper or on TV which means a lot of damage has already been done. So where does social media come into play in all of this? Because most social media is user generated content, individuals are likely to voice their issues on the different social platforms allowing you to get a “sneak peak” of a potentially large predicament. A lot of times these issues could have been addressed and resolved to stop the situation from escalating but the school was simply unaware of the issue. By having the presence on the different social platforms before anything negative occurs you will have a solid, built in audience to combat the crisis before it occurs. If you start creating social profiles in a reaction to a problem that’s already established itself, the social profiles can come off as a desperate attempt to quiet the problem. So make sure to establish the social presence now and not later.


A Way to Reach Out and Stay Current In the current economy people have become more aware of different tuition breaks or special offers that different institutions will make available. Facebook and Twitter can help you to really illustrate these important opportunities and will allow you to instantly reach a very large (and targeted) crowd. The important thing to keep in mind is to always stay current. If the last updated post was about a tuition break that ended a month ago, you can get yourself into hot water. As long as you have somebody managing your campaign responsibly the benefits can be limitless.


Social Media Used To Identify Areas of Opportunity Several institutions might not be receiving the honest feedback they require from current and potential students regarding items like programs offered, enrollment processes, and many more. Current and potential students can often voice frustration and illustrate a problem that the institution never even knew existed. It can also be good to gauge the interest of your targeted audience on different programs you are thinking about creating. If there is a large demand from you online social media community about a specific program, it can really help your decision making process. I have also seen specific examples where an institution has seen through social media that people might have tried to get in contact with them but were unsuccessful in doing so for whatever reason. These students used Facebook and Twitter to contact the institution directly and were able to be guided in the proper direction to begin them in the enrollment process.


The Future of Social Media There seems to be a train of thought by some institutions that if you stay off the social networks you won’t have any problems as long as it stays in the social networking realm. Unfortunately, this strategy looks like it will not realistic (if it ever was) in the near future. Google and Microsoft’s search engine Bing recently made a deal with Twitter and Facebook to start including “tweets” and status updates within their organic search results. No one is sure how much these will be integrated into search results but many are establishing themselves in the social networking globe sooner rather than later. This is so they won’t have to quickly scramble in order to deal with a disagreeable post when it begins to show up in branded keyword searches.


Social media is a great tool when used properly and optimized correctly. It is the new “frontier” that institutions will have to deal with (voluntarily or not) in order to keep a clean reputation and deliver the best results to current and potential students.