The main social media platform we have been focusing on at our college is LinkedIn. We have been engaging our students in LinkedIn by helping them create their profile and completing it in its entirety. We have also helped them search for jobs and follow companies on LinkedIn. I have explained to my students that by following companies on LinkedIn the company's news feed appears on their Home page on LinkedIn and they can find out about job openings within the company.
Hi Karina,
Just to share some experience, my office used Facebook in different ways for multiple goals. We created a Career Services Profile page so we could "friend" graduates. We had to wait for students to be graduates as "friending" students was against fraternization policies. Once we friended graduates, our shared Career Services profile could be used by all career services advisors to private message graduates, see their wall posts, and get their updates in the news feed. This helped us data mine, monitor behaviors, and communicate with graduates which helped us optimize our ability to achieve employment rate goals. We also created a Facebook Alumni group so we could leverage the community to help each other and students. We used this group in simple ways - for instance, we could toss a question out to the group such as what their favorite resource websites were for graphic design and they'd jump in and share. We could post a portfolio website of a student and request feedback on the work as another example. This was helpful in very practical ways. A third way we used Facebook was as a Page and we focused on building our "likes" among students. We ran contests and had "secret" Facebook-only events to create a feeling of exclusivity for our Facebook followers to drive actions such as resume reviews, portfolio reviews, employer site visits, etc. This helped us as we used these tactics to encourage students to work on things like their resumes and portfolios well ahead of graduation so they were better prepared and had already begun networking. It also helped us build a pipeline of ready candidates for open job orders to place students prior to graduating. I hope some of these practical tips help give you ideas. We used Twitter primarily for our own professional development (PLN). I found Twitter to be ideal for listening and learning from others.
Robert Starks Jr.
We are currently getting familiar with Facebook and Twitter. As it says, we are still determining our goal from it and how we are going to utilize it.
Hi Christina,
Klout is a good tool to gain some simple insights such as weather or not your influence is growing and in what subject matter areas. Klout can also be used to find influencers on certain topics when building a PLN. However, be careful about getting caught up with trying to improve a Klout score - this can quickly turn non-productive. As long as social media is helping you accomplish your business goals, that's what matters most.
Robert Starks Jr.
We currently use LinkedIn and Facebook, however, I am excited to start using Klout in showing the power/influence of what we are putting out into the social media community.
Hi Shawn,
I'm so glad to hear you will actually be researching before choosing platforms. So many don't do this critical step and find that they either chose tools that are not widely used by their students and/or alumni, or use so many that their strategies become unsustainable because of the work involved. You may also decide that you use different tools for different purposes - for instance, I know many institutions use LinkedIn more for their alumni engagement strategy whereas Facebook may be used more with students to market career services and build affinity. The course talks about a number of ways to do this research - how do you think you'll go about your research and analysis?
Robert Starks Jr.
Currently, since we are at the start of developing our Career Services Department, we currently only use Facebook, in the form of the College's Facebook page. Expansion beyond this is necessary, but will require research and proper planning before as opposed to randomly selecting which social media outlets to participate in. Proper analysis and choice of social media selected will help our Career Services department remain relevant on the media we choose to employ.
Hi Joyah,
It sounds like whereas you are strategically using social media tools to engage with students to accomplish your own goals, your department is not. What is/has prevented a department-wide strategy in career services? What do you hope to accomplish by incorporating these additional resources for use in a department strategy?
Robert Starks Jr.
Which social media platforms are you using and why do you use them?
YEAH, WE’RE SOCIAL!
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube. I have a personal account with them all. I am not connected to them for my company. We do use these media networks to interact with the students, to see if they are working, to update them as to what is happening at the school. We have trivia, support monthly holidays and to show off our photos to the public of how much fun we are having at our school.
Hi Fernandel,
Finding a student's employment status is typically the "low hanging fruit." Do you use other signals to modify your approach with students such as the examples discussed in the course? For instance, when I see signals of things that interest students such as their music preferences, or the things they've "liked" on Facebook, those have often been ways to engage students in conversation to simply open dialogue. Then, as you build rapport with "MIA" students and/or re-engage them, you strategically steer the conversation down the path that is your goal but don't open with "career conversation." Have you ever used these more subtle, strategic strategies to engage any of your students based on the data you've mined? Any examples would be great to hear.
Robert Starks Jr.
If the grad is unresponsive, I use the data to discover their employment status and general circumstances. This gives me the necessary insight used in deciding my next communication strategy. For example, if the grad posted they're on vacation for the next 2 weeks I may decide to hold off my next communication attempt until week 3.
Hi Fernandel,
When you mine for data, how do you use that data in your communication strategies?
Robert Starks Jr.
We use Facebook primarily to data mine and communicate with many students/grads. We also encourage some grads to set up LinkedIn accounts for professional networking.
Our institution is just starting to utilize social media for Career Services. Each campus has a Facebook page to inform students and graduates of campus events and news. We are just starting to implement seperate Career Servcies pages to highlight employment issues and employment news.
We also utilize Facebook as a way to reach graduates who will not communiciate by phone or email.
We will be using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as our primary social media accounts. We also have a Tumbler and a Foursquare as well. In our area, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare seem to be most popular and so we have decided to start with those.
We are currently using facebook for student pictures and feedback, twitter for making announcements to potential and current students, and youtube to share promotional videos with some of the best work from our students.
Hi Paola,
Which platforms do you use for personal use and for business? Do you find you use the same platforms but use them differently? What is your experience?
Robert Starks Jr.
Social media Plarforms are so important to everyone, it doesn't matter what they need, could be jobs,personal relations all that it's interact with people and specially students!!
Hi Robert, great question. Yes. We take pride in our student's work and encourage for student's to post the work we feel best displays their talents. But students have the right to post anything they want. That said, we are careful to give them constructive criticism and help them make changes where necessary to improve the work they post. Of course, this is an objective field that is open to interpretation. I have had students post a video that does not adhere to the quality standards we have in our academy. But it has 1 million hits. Advertisers are willing to pay for that, more so than higher quality videos with less. At the end of the day, as long as we give them our thoughts and provide the support to help them improve their projects, we have done our part. At least that is how we look at it.
Hi Daniel,
I'm wondering if you've run into any examples where the content a student publishes has actually hurt their online reputation and/or job prospects and if you've had to intervene. Have you run into any issues such as this?
Robert Starks Jr.
