A guide for professionalism in Higher education

A guide for professionalism in Higher education 

[The use of social media in Higher education for marketing and communications]

AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA AND ITS COMMON USES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

 Social media comprises of activities that involve socializing and networking online through words, pictures and videos. Social media is redefining how we relate to each other as humans and how we as humans relate to the organizations that serve us. It is about dialog – two way discussions bringing people together to discover and share information (Solis 2008).

SOCIAL MEDIAS 

FACEBOOK 

Facebook is made up of six primary components: personal profiles, status updates, networks (geographic regions, schools, companies), groups, applications and fan pages. When Facebook launched the fan pages concept in November 2007, many universities jumped at the opportunity to create an official Facebook presence for their university. As of January 2008 there were 420 universities taking advantage of this new feature (Cheater 2008). Fan pages are similar to personal profiles, but can be used by businesses. They include wall posts, discussion boards, photos, videos, and many other applications. People who view the page can choose to become “fans” of your organization, and this shows on their personal profile page, for their friends to see. This creates a viral marketing effect – when one of their friends sees they’ve become a fan of another organization that interests them, they’re likely to become a fan themselves. Facebook pages also offer organizations the ability to communicate with fans through direct and targeted messages (such as fans in a specific network or age group), and view “insights,” which includes detailed statistics on the usage of the organization’s page.

MySpace

Myspace is an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends, share photos, journals and interests. MySpace allows users to fully customize their profiles by complete changing the appearance, background and format of their pages (Solis 2008)

YouTube

 Youtube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through the Web. It allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through Web sites, mobile devices, blogs, and e-mail.Universities have been making videos for 20+ years to aid in recruitment efforts. YouTube has given them a platform to easily distribute these videos to a much wider audience, and without the costs of burning to CDs/DVDs and postage to mail to a narrow audience.

Flickr

Flickr is an online photo site where users upload photos that can be organized in sets and collections. Public photos may be viewed and commented on by others (Consortium 2007). Universities have found Flickr to be a great tool to easily share photos with students, alumni, faculty and staff. The automation of uploading the photos, adding captions and tags, and turning them into organized collections with slideshows without any manual Web coding, is a great timesaver for timestrapped Web professionals.

Blogs

blogs are a form of online journal. They can have a single author, or several. Most blogs allow readers to post comments in response to an article or post (Consortium 2007). The most popular use of blogs for marketing in higher education is having currently enrolled students blog about their lives on campus, as a recruiting initiative in conjunction with admissions.

del.icio.us,

del.icio.us is  now also available at delicious.com, is one of many social bookmarking Web sites. The primary use of del.icio.us is to store bookmarks online, which allows users to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. Tags are used to organize and remember bookmarks, as compared to folders built in to Web browsers bookmark tool. You can also use del.icio.us to see links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can browse and search del.icio.us to discover bookmarks that everyone else has saved.

These are the social medias that helped in marketing and communications. The most frequently used apps will be Facebook which is easier to keep in touch and do any advertising. Followed by blog which is also a common tool used in marketing products or advertisement.

Overall, social medias had benefited the professional field alot and ease the work load by improving the quality of work with minimum efforts.