Why and how college students use social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace

A few institutions have started to integrate social networking websites in their marketing mix:

The University of Florida has started to buy online advertising on the Facebook to promote some of its graduate programs to a targeted audience of undergrads.

The Park School of Communication at Ithaca College has launched its myspace page for its connected alumni and to showcase its students’ video work.

The University of Phoenix advertises on Facebook (haven’t seen any of their ads on myspace yet, but they are probably there – as anywhere else on the Web ;-)

If you’re thinking about it — but still need to convince a few people –, I’ve found something that might help you (them) understand why and how college students use social networking websites: a targeted focus group on the topic, courtesy of Yahoo!

Doreen Bloch (Palo Alto High School Journalism Graduate) and Paul Stamatiou (Georgia Tech) have been working as summer interns on the company corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal.

Doreen recently hosted a discussion about social networking websites with 6 other Yahoo! interns. The resulting focus group is available as a 20-minute nicely produced audio download or a text transcript.

Here’s just a quote from Richard Crowley, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, that might get people in Alumni Relations thinking a bit more about the recently released Facebook API:

“[Facebook]’s a way to keep track of a much broader array of people that could be real benefits to you down the line. I can’t imagine going into this almost professional state of my life without the list of literally hundreds of people I’ve come across and now keep track of. Where I still have a way to get in touch with all of these people I know should I need to talk to them for some important reason.”