Late last month I was honored to present an Academic Impressions webinar with Widmeyer’s Dr. Doug Usher, and Ann McDermott, director of admissions for College of the Holy Cross.  We discussed considerations for using social media in the admissions process (you can find a copy of our presentation here).

We had strong interest from colleges and universities across the country, and at the end of the presetation fielded more questions than we had time to answer.  I provided written responses to the two outstanding questions and thought the information might be of interest.

Feel free to post a comment or email me at teresa.parrot@widmeyer.com if you have further thoughts.

Can anyone provide benchmarks on resources to start this up and maintain it? e.g., staff, hours for initial setup and then maintenance?

The start-up times vary based on the scope of the social media presence you want to maintain.  You need to consider what sites you want to be a part of, the conversations you wish to conduct, and the preferred level of participation you want to conduct.  Specifically for College of the Holy Cross there is a team of three who maintain the website and social media presence, but there is a campus committee tasked with supplying content to the team that span the campus, including offices of the College’s leadership.  Often, creating the sites and pages is the easy part. Maintaining the conversations and finding content that keeps people engaged takes time and creativity.

Can you recommend some colleges that are successfully using social media? Could you send some URLs in the follow up email?

So that we aren’t seen as showing preference for certain institutions or their social media vendors, we are going to defer to third parties for our examples.  This article outlines the “Top Four Colleges on Social Media.”  The comments section at the end of the entry also lists additional sites to consider.  In addition, this is a widely circulated list of the “Top 100 Colleges on Twitter.”

During the question and answer session during the presentation we also said we would forward additional policy resources.  Before drafting a social media policy, consider this article on Mashable.com that discusses the 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy. Once you’ve thought through the author’s considerations, then peruse the following sample policies.  The list includes a mix of public and private institutions of varying sizes.  We aren’t advocating for using any of these policies.  Instead we are recommending you take the elements from each that best fit your institution and social media needs.

Sample higher ed social media policies:

• Adrian College
• Aquinas College
• Ball State University
• Colorado State University
• Columbia College Chicago
• Highland Community College
• Seattle University
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center
• University of Missouri System

And you never know when you will find inspiration from the corporate world.  Take a look at these corporate policies and this comprehensive list to see if they have any insight you can apply at your institution.

Tags: admissions social media, Ball State University, College of the Holy Cross, Colleges and Universities, Education, Higher education, Holy Cross, Social Media, social media policy, United States, University of Kansas, University of Missouri

Posted by Teresa Valerio Parrot on 02/8/10. Categories: Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response