Filton College: A Net Natives Client Case Study

September/October 2011

Client Background
Filton College provides courses in South Gloucestershire and Bristol for local, regional, national and international learners, educating approximately 12,000 students from ages 14 – adulthood.

Needs of the Client
Filton college had some very specific criteria for the demographic that they wanted to target.  The college wanted to target 16-24 year olds in their area who were NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) with the aim of promoting their  very clever initiative to get young people studying and working…

They had a limited budget and only a 2 week window to generate some results.

Net Natives Solution
Being the daring and expert bunch we are for the education sector we took to this challenge with verve! We quickly built a Facebook advertising campaign which consisted of 80 individual adverts we could test, track and optimise to over 149,000 Facebook users who matched their geographic and demographic profiling. Our facebook advertising experts then closely managed the campaign night and day (okay, just day) to ensure we were pushing the adverts which were gaining the lowest cost-per-click and gaining the highest click-through-rate.

The Results
Due to our ever diligent team we were able to ensure that their adverts we seen over 4.5 million times resulting in over 1300 clicks, in just a 2 week period! This resulted in over 20 applications and lots and lots of phone calls!

Filton College were so impressed with our efforts that they had the following very kind words to say about us:

“We’re delighted with the success of our Facebook advertising campaign, delivered by Net Natives. Precisely targeting 16-18 Neets, we’ve converted over 20 applications so far and had lots of enquiries. Net Natives really understood our needs and achieved maximum return on our marketing spend.”

To find out what we can do for your next event or just to have a chat about all things social media, get in touch with ben@netnatives.co.uk

(A Net Natives Speculation)

By now you may well have heard of the new Facebook Timeline feature. It’s a super revamp of the classic profile and is much more content-rich, allowing you to navigate by year/month, area, and so on.  For the users, it’s undoubtedly going to add to the whole Facebook experience.

At this stage – it is NOT known which features, if any, Facebook will be implementing. But nevertheless we are excited about the potential changes and benefits that are to be gained if they do.

After I got it set up on my profile today, I had a good old fiddle and a bit of a think about how some of it’s key aspects could be used to help build stronger engagement and perception of your business.  Here is what I thought…

Much Stronger Visual Branding

 

Timeline allows you to upload a large picture of your choosing to act as the header of your profile.  The displayed picture is 851×315 pixels, but you can upload a larger photo and drag it around to view just the area that you wish (like the way you edit a profile picture thumbnail image).

In terms of prime real-estate for advertising your brand, the Cover image area is almost 3 times as large as the current Page Profile image, and a much better shape congruent with a more typical website layout. This large space allows a lot more scope for advertising than the previous image, as well as having a strong visual branding.

You would want to include:

• Company logo
• Website URL
• Attractive images to catch the eye
• Key promotions & Calls to Action (Be sure to join our mailing list for offers! etc)

Achievements, Milestones & History

A feature that I love is the ability to just go back in your own timeline and put in things you missed! So if I got a 25m swimming certificate when I was 10 (YES!) then I can navigate back to that year, and put a photo of it up and write about it.

For a college or similar institution, the possibilities are endless. Think of how Apple’s timeline would look, for example. The company was founded on April 1st 1976, so that would be their first entry.  The most recent would be the sad loss of Steve Jobs, and in between would be all the great stuff they did such as the iPhone, iTunes and so on. All the key milestones in their company history can be added now and interested parties can easily access it.

• You could add in when a new Principal started work, or when a lecturer retired.
• You could post up exam results for each year
• Any awards the college receieved
• Press cuttings & interviews
• Old photos of the institution
• Footage of special events (videos of concerts you put on etc)

The new timeline, when applied to Pages, will allow you to add engaging, rich content which is organised in a sensible, life-relevant way.

Currently, your fans can only interact with your recent status updates unless they are prepared to do some pretty hardcore scrolling and clicking on “show older posts”. Even then they can only move in reverse chronological order with no way to skip a section.

Interaction is key – and by giving your users a history of interesting and fun things to interact with, you would be able to grow your fanbase and increase your prominence in News Feed compared to your competitors.

Promote Your Favourite Content

Facebook has long had the ability to hide unwanted stories on your news feed.  However the new Timeline gives you even more options.

• Hide or delete it entirely with the pencil icon
• If you want to strongly feature it – click on the star and it goes the full width!

Once you click on the star, this is how it appears – lovely full width:

This feature is ideal for really showcasing a current posting and making it stand out. Got an Open Day coming up? Use the maximum space that you can to promote it.  Make it obvious which posts are important, and make the experience of browsing your Timeline easy for the user.

Favourite Icons

Currently pages are limited to rather tiny icons and text links appearing underneath the main profile picture. These link to the Facebook classic apps such as Wall & Info, and also to any custom tabs you have added. Like this:

However on the new Timeline they are much larger graphical links. If Facebook does implement timeline on Pages, and the developer is able to add these larger custom icons, then it would be another great space to really highlight what it is your are trying to promote via your custom tabs. Here’s how they look on the new Timeline:

• Find out about our next Open Day
• Download our Course Guide
• Email Us
• Read testimonials from Students

On the personal profile Timeline, you can select what apps are represented in the boxes.  This feature will be great for Pages however as it stands, it only shows 4 of these links on a profile and then has a “more” button – so if it remained like that then you would need to think carefully about what the most important things to showcase were.

Getting all Geographical

One of the coolest features, thought probably not the most useful, is the Maps integration. For a while now you have been able to tag location in your posts, and now that this can be added to photos/posts retrospectively, the Map application shows you where you where, and when.

If this was implemented, it would only be relevant to certain types of Page (colleges don’t tend to go off travelling the world!) but you could perhaps use it in terms of Open Days and any other kind of event where the college is represented officially in a different environment. In terms of the user, having your college listed as a Place is also very important – so that other users can see it pop up the map and this might drive traffic towards your official page.

The Future

Presently, it’s a waiting game. We don’t know to what extent Facebook intend to implement the Timeline feature for Pages. We feel the most likely & immediately useful changes would be:

• Adding the Cover Image
• Navigate by date to view history

But would you use this as a marketing call to action? No, it helps to thin of it as an organic “about us” page.

What do you think?

After attending Net Natives’ Free Social Media Workshop, South Thames College were amazed at the potential of using Facebook to recruit new students.

They jumped straight in, using our Facebook Advertising Service and were overwhelmed with the results we produced. For their summer courses South Thames College received 760 responses from which, they had 140 course applications! Let’s see what South Thames have to say…

“Net Natives put together a Facebook campaign for us that increased applications for the advertised programme tenfold. As well as getting a great response to the advert they also gave us a lot of help in getting our web page set up to maximise conversions. From advising us on setting up the adverts through to providing analysis after the campaign ended we got a great service on a limited budget.”

With their social media strategy being implemented based upon Net Natives’ free recommendations, South Thames College approached us on the next stage of their social media journey – to build them a fully interactive and branded Facebook page.  And we are as pleased as they are with the end product. Click the image below to have a look for yourself!

Click me to see South Thames College's New Facebook Page

There was great engagement on their Facebook page already, however they only had 64 fans. We found 15 different Facebook Pages for South Thames College including community pages and unofficial pages. To ensure they receive the most from their page we then merged all affiliated pages together and increased their fan count by 842 connections! A 729% increase in fans/connections over night!

This is what South Thames College have to say about Net Natives’ Social Media strategies and services…

“I’ve loved working with Net Natives, they’re  efficient, informative, professional and fun to work alongside. They’ve come up with some really creative ideas with solid calls to action that have brought our Facebook page to life, increasing our fans from 64 to nearly 1000 overnight! They really know their stuff and have delivered on everything we asked for and more. I need to find another excuse for a project so I can work with them again. I would thoroughly recommend Net Natives to anyone!”

Jade Watson, South Thames College

If you would like any social media advice, want us to merge your Facebook pages, would like a Facebook page then please get in touch.

A lot of companies don’t know this but any business which has a Facebook page can have a unique URL for their page. This makes it easier for customers to find you and looks more professional on business cards, marketing materials etc.

For example:

www.facebook.com/socialnatives

The only caveat from Facebook is that your page must have at least 25 fans.

To set up a personalised URL for your Facebook page you will need to be logged into the Facebook account where you are the administrator of the page.

Once logged in go, to this link www.facebook.com/username

You will see the below box on the page. Select the appropriate page from the dropdown and follow the instructions.

Once you set your username you cannot change it so make sure that it is correct before confirming. Once it is set you will be able to go directly to the personalised domain to view your page.

For example: Britishmedicaljobs.com set their username to britishmedicaljobs. You can view their Facebook page by going to www.facebook.com/britishmedicaljobs

Read our blog post on how to promote your Facebook page.

If you haven’t got a Facebook page why not get us to make you one?

If you need help getting to that magic 25 fan mark, why not try the Natives’ Facebook advertising service.

If you have any other questions on any of our services then get in touch.

28 million over 18 year olds used Facebook last month, all can be targeted with effective advertising based on their age, gender, location, job titles, education, interests, you name it.  So why isn’t it more popular as an advertising medium?

Any business can try Facebook advertising. Facebook make it easy to create an ad and publish it to their users.

That’s the problem, 4 out of 5 businesses who try Facebook advertising don’t use it again. On the other hand spending on Facebook has risen 10 fold in the last year. This growth is largely companies that can afford to spend a lot of money using Facebook and can afford the best tools for optimising their campaigns.

If you take the time to understand how people use Facebook and carefully monitor your advertising campaign you too can yield excellent results. Net Natives have developed our own tools for Facebook advertising and create Facebook advertising campaigns for multiple clients, with account managers working every day monitoring these campaigns to make sure they are successful for the client.

Here are our tips on getting Facebook advertising to work for your business:

1. Facebook is not Google; social is not search – Although your advertising can be incredibly targeted, you must remember that this Facebook is billboard advertising. Your users are not searching for your product or service, so you need to be imaginative. But this means that you are reaching your customers at the earliest stage in the buying cycle.
2. Be bold – Because this is display advertising and you are trying to interrupt their social conversation, you need ads which they will take notice of. Use colourful images and use concise direct language. Try not to use marketing speak, your users will appreciate this and will be more likely to click on your ads.
3. Test Multiple images, titles and ad copy – Because of the Facebook advertising  interface, most businesses will make 1 ad and just put them live on Facebook. We would recommend testing many different images and different ad copy and combining these to see which actually work. This way you will end up with a lot more ads live on Facebook. This will not only allow you to find out what your audience responds to but also will improve the longevity of your ads as your audience will be seeing many different ads and won’t get bored as quickly. As an example of what works, Net Natives create 300 ads per campaign.
4. Everyone needs an individual campaign – everyone responds differently, tailor your ads to each demographic you are trying to reach
5. Be lateral when research your demographic – think of alternative demographic groups beyond age and location. For example, we create ads based on lateral interests which will resonate with the user’s profile
6. Have a call to action in every ad - Give Facebook users a reason to click on your ads. For example if you are advertising a job make sure you have “Apply Now!” at the end of your ad copy.
7. Use both generic and specific targeting for your campaigns – We always run a broad targeted campaign married with  smaller highly specific, targeted campaigns for each of our clients. We find this greatly improves the CTR (Clickthrough Rate) of their ads.
8. Assign different targeting options to individual ads – To help monitor who clicks on our ads we actually individually create each ad with seperate targeting. For example we will have an ad aimed at a male between the ages of 18-24 who lives in London. We will also have another ad aimed at a female aged of 18-24 who lives in London. By being very specific with every ad we can stop ads that don’t perform and can tell our clients which demographics have been unsuccessful. Ideally we would recommend not only using different targeting on each ad but also simultaneously trialling different images, titles and copy. This will mean you end up with hundreds of ads in each campaign but it is by far the best way to structure and monitor an advertising campaign on Facebook.
9. Closely Monitor your Clickthrough Rate - Your Clickthrough Rate is calculated by dividing the number of impressions of a specific ad by the number of times the ad gets clicked. If your CTR begins to decrease, you may want to consider targeting a different target group or switching your advertisement. All advertisements will eventually lose their effectiveness. Your ability to stop them before this point will determine how long your campaign will be successful for.
10. Don’t be afraid to stop ads running – We are constantly pausing ads that don’t gain impressions or clicks. If an ad is not working pause it as it will mean more budget for those ads that do receive clicks.
11. Take your audience to a relevant destination – you are interrupting a social conversation with a relevant advert based on their profile that will resonate; don’t ruin all of that hard work, by not creating the right destination. Make sure your landing page relates to the advert, adheres to standard online advertising practices (this is a whole other topic, but feel free to ask us if you have any questions).

These are just some of the techniques the Natives use, coupled with our in-house social advertising tools, to make Facebook work for our clients. If you would like any more advice or would just like us to take care of the whole process for you please Get in Touch.

Your potential students regularly use on Facebook; placing the right advert next to the right student’s Facebook profile is perfect advertising platform to enroll students and promote your open days. Drop us an email: ben@netnatives.co.uk Give us a bell: 01273 734640

click to see me full size

Natives provide a unique Facebook Advertising Service dedicated for Colleges’ Open Days, developed using our own Facebook advertising management tools. “The Net Natives’ Facebook service has proved to be the most cost effective, targeted advertising medium we could have imagined.”

Here’s what we do

With a real case study from The College of West Anglia, who recently asked us to promote specific open days for three of their campuses in October and November.

1. Take the right brief – we consult with each college to work out who you want to reach and what you want to say to them. The message and tone for social advertising is different to other advertising medium

2. Research – we use our own Facebook tools to research your target audience; for West Anglia College there were 70,000 potential students between the ages of 15 and 16 years in the three catchment areas

3. Segment & Target the audience – this is the key, the only way to make Facebook advertising work is to target specific adverts to individuals. For the college, we broke down the audience by Gender, Age and Location.

4. Create multiple relevant adverts that resonate with each targeted segmented audience – again, the more targeted the better, for the College we used the Natives advertising tools to created 768 individual adverts for this single campaign.

5. Create the perfect landing destination – we consult with every College to help create a destination that actively encourages sign up, either within Facebook or, in the case of West Anglia, to your own website

6. Test and promote the adverts work – your campaign needs care otherwise your adverts will stop to be shown. For West Anglia we constantly tested our 768 adverts to understand which adverts were working for each segment

Gender: Female Age: 15

Gender: Female Age: 16

Gender: Male Age: 15

So what happened within 1 week?

Within a week the Colleges adverts were shown to the right audience nearly 4 million times, with over 1,100 potential students responding. Here’s what they said… “Facebook is where our students spend all of their time, making it the obvious choice for promoting our open days. The problem for us was how to create and manage Facebook advertising campaigns that work. The Net Natives’ Facebook service has proved to be the most cost effective, targeted advertising medium we could have imagined.”

So you have a new Facebook page? Good, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a special one made by us – like one of these beauties. If not, we’re sure it’s lovely and good you are there. Now how do you get people to notice you and engage with your site? Of course, there’s clever Facebook advertising, but here’s some simple techniques you need to get traffic onto your Facebook page…

• Use your friends, clients and colleagues contacts – let them know and get them to like
• Ensure all staff have a link to “like” the page in their email signature
• Ensure the Facebook logo is prominent on your website
• Twitter – refer all your twitter followers to your Facebook page and prompt them to “like” it and remind them every once in a while
• Promote the Facebook page on relevant staff member’s Linked In profiles
• The Facebook (and Twitter) logos should appear prominently on all off line print work (brochures, advertising)
• Use Facebook Like buttons (but use them properly!)

These are the simplest ideas, if you have any more, please add them or if you want more ideas – get in touch

“Net Natives have been able to drastically increase the visibility of Synergy’s brand and engagement on Facebook.”

When you have been successfully match-making candidates with their perfect jobs since 1997, how do you go about ensuring you are now attracting the job-hunters of the Facebook age?

The Synergy Group is now the largest privately-owned recruitment company in the UK, turning over in excess of £37million per year. They knew that social media now plays a crucial part in the recruitment market, and got in touch to see what we could do for them.

The Challenge?

Synergy wanted to properly connect with their audience using social media. We suggested the best way to do this would be to create and develop a community on Facebook, where they would be able to engage more with their current candidates while also attracting new ones.

What did Net Natives do?

We created a Facebook page for Synergy, providing fully-branded pages within Facebook with clear calls-to-action for the various recruitment divisions as well as an on-page newsletter sign-up and CV-registration functionality. Candidates could now complete their search without leaving the Facebook environment. It’s where they want to be; it’s where we want them to be.

We then generated a twitter feed page and branded job feed pages, using our Facebook Moderation Tool to catch any profanity or spam, as well as flagging up positive comments so the staff at Synergy can better engage with and understand their candidates.

Our proprietary Facebook Advertising Tool meant we could also create thousands of Facebook adverts for various advertising campaigns.

The Result?

The number of fans on Synergy’s Facebook page has increased by 215% within a month, and over 4.5 million relevant advert views within Synergy’s Facebook demographic.

Nearly 1,400 Facebook users clicked on these adverts, with Facebook now being the 7th highest-referring site to the Synergy Group website, ahead of their job boards and behind only the major search engines and job aggregators. Candidates directed to Synergy’s website from their Facebook page have spent more time, on average, on the Synergy site than those coming from any of the other top 10 referring sources – including Google.

“By combining clear branding and functionality with effective targeted promotions, Net Natives have been able to drastically increase the visibility of Synergy’s brand and engagement on Facebook. With their support and tools, we feel entirely comfortable with the social environment and, even better, have increased our applications, site visits and candidate pool as a result.”

Building your company’s uniquely designed Facebook page, backed up with an effective advertising campaign (500,000 relevant impressions) for only £1,499! It can only be the Net Natives Flat Fee Facebook Service…

Look, we know you know you need to be “on” Facebook. We know you know that by having an effective presence where your clients, peers and candidates spend their time will improve your reputation, your sales and client engagement. We know that even if you don’t know that, your competitors will.

But where do you start? How do you build a presence? How do you engage? How do you monitor what is being said about you so you can deal with it effectively? How do you build an audience? What do you do with them?

Hmmm wouldn’t it be good if those Net Natives had a solution that for a simple flat fee we could make it all happen…?

That’s what we thought…

The Net Natives’ £999 FLAT FEE FACEBOOK service is…

• Build your company a unique, branded Facebook page
• Using our Net Natives’ Facebook Monitoring Tool, keep an eye out for any positive or inappropriate comments
• Create cracking adds and drive traffic to your Facebook page using our Net Natives’ Facebook Ad Tool
• Feed content to your page delivered by our Natives’ Facebook Application

If you want to see some things we’ve done close up, have a mosey on down to…

Social Natives

ADP Dental

British Medical Jobs

The Synergy Group

Connex Education

Gec-Con

Oh and what about case studies and testimonials, you say…?

“By using Net Natives’ social media channel to promote our support of the industry through relevant content and an engaging page, we are already seeing increased sign-ups and candidate conversions on our job board from our Facebook page.”  British Medical Jobs

““Net Natives have proven the concept for us for effective Facebook advertising. They are our go to agency.” Brighton and Hove City College

Get in touch and we’ll get you started straight away.

This is one that may have slipped through the net, but you HAVE to read this if you are a recruiter or recruitment company…

If someone lists their place of employment on Facebook, but there hasn’t been a page created, then Facebook will automatically create a community page and assign that person to them. In April this year alone they create 6.5 million community pages - read about it here…

Get in touch if you want to find out more…