With Google focused on integrating Google+ with other services, and Facebook switching over to the much more archival Timeline, there is clearly something of a war brewing between these two Internet behemoths. Facebook, with over 990 million users worldwide, is far and away the social media leader, and as we’ve discussed, it is also very popular with prospective students.

Google+, however, has made inroads, and with Google’s other products, Google Analytics, YouTube and Gmail most prominently, it is well positioned to continue taking bites out of Facebook (particularly since they’ve incorporated social circles and social reports). The question is: should Facebook fight back by launching its own search engine?

They can definitely benefit from such a development, even if Google has an almost 65% market share worldwide. For one thing, search is the top dog when it comes to advertising dollars (Google still generates most of its revenue from search), and there is enough evidence to suggest that Facebook would be able to offer advertisers something of an unparalleled service. After all, people now spend more time on Facebook than all of Google’s services, combined, this includes YouTube and Gmail (which is open all day on my computer).

Clearly, if Facebook created a stand-alone website, similar to Google’s, it’s very possible that their results page would be much more personalized. The wealth of information that the social media giant knows about its user base (let’s be honest, they know everything about you), would also likely lead to higher CTR and conversion rates for advertisers. It’s doubtful, however, that they would go this route, as it runs counter to the way they’ve worked in the past.

It’s much more likely that they will implement a more elaborate search function within their existing platform. There are reports, in fact, that Facebook is currently focusing a lot of resources on improving the site’s current search capabilities (which is understandable, it’s frustrating to say the least). A drastically improved search function, combined with the vast social (and public) information available on Facebook, would be something very unique, and it may very well create something of a universal platform, a sort of portal through which users experience the Web. To that end, Facebook was awarded a patent last year called, “Visual tags for search results generated from social network information”. This is how it was described:

Search results, including sponsored links and algorithmic search results, are generated in response to a query, and are marked based on frequency of clicks on the search results by members of social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation from the member who submitted the query. The markers are visual tags and comprise either a text string or an image.

Clearly, something like that, something that incorporates a powerful search engine with a user’s social world, can compete with Google.

To hear more about the social network’s vision for the future, check out Facebook’s Bret Taylor talking at the Web 2.0 Summit:

What Will a Facebook Search Engine Mean for Higher Education?

When it comes to education marketing, a Facebook search engine may be a very powerful tool. For one thing, a majority of colleges and universities are already on Facebook. A Varsity Outreach study on 150 American colleges and universities in 2011 showed that 79% of schools had an admissions-specific Facebook presence (this was up from 65% in 2010.) We’d be surprised if it didn’t increase in 2012, as Facebook has been testing a new feature that is directly related to higher education: Groups for Schools.

This feature will let colleges and universities create a separate and specific community limited solely to people with active school email addresses. Essentially, this lets students and faculty create or join specialized groups within the site for specific classes, clubs and more. Should a powerful search engine be integrated into this mix, it means a whole lot of social information will suddenly be easily searchable by prospective students (of which 83% would view the Facebook page of a school they were considering). It also means that schools really need to implement and maintain a comprehensive social media plan.

Stay tuned for more developments on this topic.

What do you think about the idea of a Facebook search engine?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Google, Search Engine News, Social Media

As we’ve highlighted in the past, there have been numerous changes at Facebook lately. However, the bulk of these changes was only adopted across the board on March 30th, 2012. Since then, your school’s Facebook profile has featured the social network’s new format.

Beyond its new esthetics, the new Timeline format has changed the metrics for gauging a popular Facebook page. Before Timeline, it was all about getting fans. Now, the important thing is generating likes and comments. This means that your new Facebook profile page has to have regular content, lively and frequent discussions and a strong visual and multimedia component – all of which require more involvement and engagement on your end.

Don’t panic!

We’ve drafted a handy ebook that describes Timeline’s features and offers a few suggestions for your school to leverage the new Facebook format: Facebook Timeline for Colleges and Universities.

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Higher Education Marketing, Higher Education Marketing Ebooks, Social Media

After Facebook had moved into its new headquarters, Mark Zuckerberg announced a “space hackathon”, an attempt to decorate the space and personalize it. This could have been anything – spray paint, posters, etc – but the intent was to “hack” the building and give it some sort of Facebook spin. The result? A “space hack” that can be seen from space.

Check out Facebook’s Giant QR Code:

Continue reading →

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Social Media

There are more changes on the way at Facebook. After having rolled out timeline, which includes milestones and a new cover photo, among other things, the social media giant is not testing a new feature that is directly related to higher education: Groups for Schools.

This new feature will let colleges and universities create a separate and specific community limited solely to people with active school email addresses. Essentially, it limits the network to students and faculty, allowing them to create or join specialized groups within the site for specific classes, clubs and more. These subgroups are listed in an open group directory, which lets members browse and find groups relevant to their interests and needs. For a school, the potential advantages to this type of feature are huge, providing students and faculty a much more focused place to converge, discuss and meet new people (imagine being able to sign in to Facebook to discuss today’s English Lit final with that cute blonde).

Continue reading →

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Social Media

Things are getting ugly in the ever merging search engine/social media sphere, with news that Yahoo is suing Facebook for allegedly infringing on their advertising, messaging and social networks patents.

The allegations claim that Facebook is infringing on patents involving messaging, news feed generation, social commenting, advertising, click fraud and more (for a grand total of 10 patent infringements). Yahoo has a series of patents in this realm, including a patent related to personalized ads and patents allowing users to customize shared information (meaning privacy control).

The lawsuit goes a little further than that though. ”Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” the company’s lawyers alleged in the suit, filed on Monday.

“To build a successful website, users need to have been easy access to many functions and tasks such as messaging and privacy options. The website owner needs revenue through functions such as advertising. All of these functions involve Yahoo innovations,” the lawsuit said, claiming ultimately that, “without Yahoo’s achievements, websites such as Facebook would not enjoy repeat visitors or substantial advertising revenue.”

If this all sounds unexpectedly catty and after-the-fact, there’s a reason: Facebook is in the IPO process, and, with billions of dollars on the line, it is unlikely to want to get down into a dirty litigation battle.

There is a precedence for this kind of behaviour from Yahoo, as the company also sued Google for patent infringement just as the search engine giant filed its IPO. Google settled with Yahoo (offering 2.7 million shares), but as Business insider reporter Jim Yarrow writes, there was a reason for that, “The reason Google settled with Yahoo is because Yahoo had a legitimate case on its hands. Yahoo bought search engine Overture, which was the first to come up with auction system for paid click ads in search. In his book on Google, “In The Plex,” Steven Levy writes, Google “adopted” Overture’s idea of pay per click, as well as Overture’s auction system.”

The case is far less open and shut against Facebook, which makes all of this that much more interesting. We’ll have to stay tuned to see how the social media giant reacts.

What do you think?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Search Engine News, Social Media, Yahoo

There has been quite a bit going on in the Facebook world lately, with the social media giant rolling out Timeline and a host of other new features. We’ve posted some Facebook tips for college marketing departments in the past, but the new changes at Facebook give colleges and universities a bit more options and flexibility.

These changes include:

• Cover, “headline” photos
• Highlighted, or “pinned” stories
• Schools Milestones
• Applications
• Facebook Offers
• Insights
• And more

As you can see, there has been substantial revision to the Facebook platform, and while it may seem like additional work for the marketing department, these changes actually will help streamline your marketing and recruiting message. It will also help make your Facebook page a much more lively and interesting place for prospects, students and alumni.

Here are some of the advantages to the Facebook changes:

Create a mood
The great thing about the 851 x 315 pixel cover photo is that it helps create a visual look and feel for the whole page. Sure, you can’t include contact information or calls-to-action in these photos, but it does give your college some prime real estate to represent your campus in the best possible way. Choose, if possible, a high quality photo that showcases some element or place of your school that is especially important, well-liked or iconic. It’s an easy way to set a mood and remind people of why they love (or want to attend) your college.

Highlight what’s important
Highlighted or pinned stories provides an opportunity for your marketing or recruiting departments to showcase open houses, campus tours, seminars, workshops and other special events that can be used to connect with prospective students. It’s also a great way to promote any great press or attention the school and its students may have recently received.

Emphasize the past
The milestones feature can help your college or university write out its history in a creative and visually stimulating way. Why send prospects to a boring “About Us” page of text when you can highlight the most important moments of your college’s history with a series of milestones on Facebook? It’s more interactive and playful, and more importantly, it’s on the platform most used by prospective students.

Customize
Probably the biggest advantage to the changes at Facebook is the ability to truly customize the look of your school’s page, with the addition of new applications and the ability to move stories and pics. Make the most of it and help your school page stand out.

Analytics
As you should know by now, we’re big fans of analytics, and anything that provides more information on your visitors (and how they’re using your page) is a real advantage. The new Facebook Insights (along with the admin panel and the ability to let users message the “brand” directly) provide much more flexibility and information with which to make future decisions.

Check out this video for more on the changes at Facebook:

What Facebook changes are you most excited about?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing Tips, Facebook, Social Media

Facebook recently upgraded their Insights analytics tool for business pages. In case you weren’t aware of this tool, here’s what the social network has to say about it: Facebook Insights offers the opportunity for “understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business and create better experiences on Facebook.”

The company incorporated numerous upgrades in December. These include some of the following features:

Increased Facebook Reach Measurement
You’ve always been able to know how many “total likes” your school page is getting, but now, Insights will also be able to report the following:

• Friends of Fans
  This will identify the total number of people your school page could be exposed to, if each of your fans shared your content.
• People Talking About This
  This tells you the number of unique people who have shared content from your page in the past week.
• Weekly Total Reach
  This shows the number of people that have seen content of yours that has been shared.

Influence of Post Frequency
When developing content for your school blog and social media platforms, do you ever wonder why some posts are more popular than others? Does frequency make a difference? Is it better to post every day? Every week? Well, this interesting new feature will help answer some of these questions, analyzing correlations between frequency of posts and the influence it has on fans. With this information you can then determine what sort of content and post frequency works best.

Engagement and Virality
As part of a comprehensive social media plan, your school will at some point have to decide what content works best on each social media platform. This feature will help you figure out what content is most effective on Facebook, measuring the following important metrics:

• Reach
  This will tell you how many people have seen the post.
• Engaged Users
  This will tell you how many people have clicked on a post.
• Talking about This
  The number of unique people who have shared content from your page in the past week
• Virality
  This will tell you the percentage of people who have shared your post (out of the total number of people who have seen it).

Reviewing these metrics for each post can give you a clear sense of what kind of content best resonates with your target audience, and more importantly, what content is most likely to be shared. This sort of insight can be invaluable.

For more on the new Facebook Insights, check out this video from Tweetheart TV’s host, Stephanie Wonderlin:

What do you think about these new features? Do you think your school will find them helpful?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Facebook, Social Media

Facebook recently upgraded their Insights analytics tool for business pages. In case you weren’t aware of this tool, here’s what the social network has to say about it: Facebook Insights offers the opportunity for “understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business and create better experiences on Facebook.”

The company incorporated numerous upgrades in December. These include some of the following features:

Increased Facebook Reach Measurement
You’ve always been able to know how many “total likes” your school page is getting, but now, Insights will also be able to report the following:

• Friends of Fans
  This will identify the total number of people your school page could be exposed to, if each of your fans shared your content.
• People Talking About This
  This tells you the number of unique people who have shared content from your page in the past week.
• Weekly Total Reach
  This shows the number of people that have seen content of yours that has been shared.

Influence of Post Frequency
When developing content for your school blog and social media platforms, do you ever wonder why some posts are more popular than others? Does frequency make a difference? Is it better to post every day? Every week? Well, this interesting new feature will help answer some of these questions, analyzing correlations between frequency of posts and the influence it has on fans. With this information you can then determine what sort of content and post frequency works best.

Engagement and Virality
As part of a comprehensive social media plan, your school will at some point have to decide what content works best on each social media platform. This feature will help you figure out what content is most effective on Facebook, measuring the following important metrics:

• Reach
  This will tell you how many people have seen the post.
• Engaged Users
  This will tell you how many people have clicked on a post.
• Talking about This
  The number of unique people who have shared content from your page in the past week
• Virality
  This will tell you the percentage of people who have shared your post (out of the total number of people who have seen it).

Reviewing these metrics for each post can give you a clear sense of what kind of content best resonates with your target audience, and more importantly, what content is most likely to be shared. This sort of insight can be invaluable.

For more on the new Facebook Insights, check out this video from Tweetheart TV’s host, Stephanie Wonderlin:

What do you think about these new features? Do you think your school will find them helpful?

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Education Marketing, Facebook, Social Media

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Student Recruitment News

CATEGORIES: Blog

Tags: Facebook, Online Lead Generation, Social Media, Twitter, Youtube