Social Media is essentially about connecting and sharing. Some of the most common ways colleges use social media include marketing, recruitment, and keeping in touch with alumni.
CC-BY-NC-SA by roger g1 on Flickr
Our campus has a Facebook page for students to “like” us and to keep up on whats happening on campus. Facebook continues to be the number one social network for all populations and can be leveraged in a variety of ways to help market the college, its programs, and campus events.
Recruitment is an important function of social media. Marquette University offers a virtual tour of their campus to prospective students and their parents using Instagram.
Whether connecting with friends and family through Facebook, networking with coworkers and colleagues through LinkedIn, following someone on Twitter, or sharing your video on YouTube, social media is increasingly becoming part of the average person’s daily life.
Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis.
– Pew Internet: Social Media Update 2013
Social media helps us to expand our professional connections as well as to organize and categorize connections into virtual communities. We can join groups, create our own, or invite others join our communities. By creating or joining existing circles, groups, or communities we can build connections with others around common interests and expand our networks far beyond what would otherwise be possible without social media.
By leveraging social media to create a sense of community, we can actually improve persistence and student success. This becomes especially relevant for the increasing percentage of students enrolling in online learning.
Community development is not simply developing a virtual campus or an online resource portal that includes an infinite number of electronic links to student resources and chat rooms. Online administrators must design meaningful opportunities for students to interact with their peers, faculty, adjuncts, and staff in a supportive and inclusive environment.
– K. Betts (2008), Online Human Touch (OHT), JOLT
By leveraging social media to help students better connect to their program of study we foster community both within and outside the classroom. These connections allow students to be more than observers, but rather participants in the campus community by contributing to the conversation and the culture of the institution, program, and classroom.
Learning at a Distance 