Nathaniel Villegas

 
When it comes to my hundreds of friends and dozens of groups, I am constantly bombarded with News Feed stories by the second. While some of these stories interest me, those that do not are mostly Fan Page stories. To understand why that is, I decided to take a look at the Fan Pages I “fan” and how they communicate.

After my few years as a Facebook user, I’ve seen Fan Pages that fall into two extremes—ones that do too much and ones that don’t do enough. A Page that does too much enters Facebook with the right intentions in terms of updating its fans; but like someone shouting through a megaphone hoping to be heard, too many news updates can annoy fans and become ignored. In contrast, there’s the Page that does nothing to create a relationship with its fans, leaving its page stagnant and forgotten. But in the middle of these two there are a few pages that do things right. For these Pages, the main idea is to get their marketing message out there. They succeed in maintaining steady traffic, showing high numbers of fans, and engage the fans with the Page. It’s a tightrope walk, balancing efforts to deliver a message while not over saturating your fan’s feeds. However for Higher Ed, it’s even more challenging because, in addition to the mentioned obstacles, these Pages have trouble targeting the intended audience while updating fans with quality posts at the same time.

For pages such as Coca-Cola and the San Francisco Giants, it is relatively easy to publish relevant, general information because the fan base is sort of singular—they are straight up fans/supporters of that brand or team, not prospect fans or former fans. With institutions, this isn’t the case because their pages usually encompass prospective students, current students, staff, faculty, parents and alumni. It is nearly impossible to control who receives what messages because of Page’s “push-to-all” method of diffusing information.

So in the end, what does all this mean for Higher Ed? How do you provide useful and valuable information out to the right audience, whether it be prospective students, current students, or alumni?

That answer is to do your best to provide relevant information that strikes conversation among multiple facets of your fan base. Stop fractioning, bring these groups together and get them talking about your school. To succeed in doing this, institutions need to adjust not only their approach to the Facebook platform, but how they measure success as well. They must stop thinking about their fan numbers like a scoreboard and start trusting Facebook’s new Insights Page as a window into their ability to truly resonate and interact with their key audiences.

Achieving broad marketing efforts on Facebook is a challenge for any company or business, but for Higher Ed institutions it’s even harder. As blunt as that may sound, Higher Ed institutions must do their best in juggling the content of their news updates because although I may exist to you as a fan, information that doesn’t interest me can easily be hidden. When your status updates don’t exist in my News Feed, my existence as a fan is meaningless, and ultimately that is a decision that I get to make by simply clicking “Hide.”

See the original post on Inigral's blog.

 


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