November 16, 2011
By Lacey Johnson
More colleges are using Facebook to recruit students, according to the results of a recent survey of college admissions and marketing staff that was released on Wednesday.
Nearly 80 percent of the institutions reported using the social-networking site for admissions purposes, a 13-percentage-point increase from last year. This is the second survey of Facebook use in admissions conducted by Varsity Outreach, a company that helps colleges with online promotion and networking.
More than half of the respondents said they considered Facebook to be a “very important” admissions tool, rating it above YouTube, blogs, Twitter, and other social-media networks.
Sixty-three percent of the colleges described Facebook as an integral part of their marketing strategy, and more than half said it had had a significant impact on recruiting students. The effectiveness of colleges’ Facebook pages were primarily measured by counting “likes,” “followers,” group members, and comments, according to a report on the survey results.
The number of admissions and marketing professionals who said they were comfortable with Facebook has also grown, with more than a third considering themselves “experts,” and only 6 percent saying they are “not too familiar” or “novices.” Nearly three-quarters of them reported using a combination of pages, groups, applications, and personal profiles to promote their colleges to prospective students.
According to Varsity Outreach, 150 colleges completed and returned the online survey out of roughly 2,000 colleges solicited. The company did not calculate a margin of error for its findings.
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