Thought Facebook was only for current or prospective students?
Wrong.
In their 43-minute screencast for HigherEdBlogCon, The Teeming Web, Bob Robertson-Boyd from Capital University and Dimitri Glazkov Estrada explain, among other things, how you should use the Facebook to keep in touch with your alums.
As you know, most of your current students are already on the Facebook — “because everybody has to be there to have some kind of social life on campus”.
Well, Bob and Dimitri suggest that you start creating a group on the Facebook for your future alums. By providing this option, you would be able to get seniors interested in keeping in touch with your institution through some crosslinking with your alum association website.
You might need an edu email address to get an account on the Facebook, but once you’re there, you can keep your account even if you change your email address.
By inviting seniors to join an alum group to receive information right on the Facebook, you’ll get a better chance to engage them back into your own alum community.
Simple, but smart.
This is only one of the great ideas discussed by Bob and Dimitri in their presentation.
Make sure that you take the time to watch it until the end, as they present some screenshots of what they’re also working on for prospective students, putting back social networking right into admission web pages.