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

Social media analysts Klout recently published a list of the Top 10 colleges ranked by their influence.  Klout originally just measured Twitter influence but can now incorporate Facebook Pages, YouTube and a variety of other platforms.

We don’t know if they compared non US colleges or not to get these scores (as they are all American institutions), but these are an interesting starting point for any of you who are looking to build a bigger Twitter influence and would like to see how some top Tweeters are going about it.

Net Natives will shortly be producing a Newsletter which will feature a leaderboard of the UK’s most engaging Colleges, based on Facebook activity. If you want to find out about this at the first opportunity, then email hello@netnatives.co.uk and like/follow our Facebook and Twitter

You can click on the Klout links above to access and see the breakdown of scores once you have signed in, but for now, just get clicking on the links below and follow the Top 10 on Twitter!  See if you agree with Klout in terms of their influence and how they go about things. They are all undeniably popular Tweeters, but what do you think of their content?

1. Texas A&M University – http://twitter.com/#!/TAMU
2. University of Wisconsin-Madison http://twitter.com/#!/UWMadison
3. Harvard University – http://twitter.com/#!/HARVARD
4. University of Oklahoma – http://twitter.com/#!/UofOklahoma
5. Stanford University – http://twitter.com/#!/Stanford
6. Indiana University Bloomington – http://twitter.com/#!/IUBloomington
7. Syracuse University – http://twitter.com/#!/SyracuseU
8. University of California – http://twitter.com/#!/Cal
9. Louisiana State University – http://twitter.com/#!/lsu
10. Marquette University – http://twitter.com/#!/MarquetteU

(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 the fundamental announcements at Facebook’s f8 conference, all owners of pages that have custom app on their Facebook pages received this timely reminder

“Upgrade Your App to OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS by October 1st…all apps on Facebook need to support OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS to make the platform more secure.”

This basically means that if your page’s apps don’t adhere to Facebook’s standard then they won’t be supported. In Facebook’s own words, they “will no longer work”

It feels like the “millenium bug” all over again… except this time it may actually happen.

YOUR Facebook could die

All About Security

Facebook apps (custom page tabs, games and any non-standard Facebook stuff) live within a magic window in the website called the “canvas” (the middle bit basically). It’s a thing called an iFrame – which allows a webpage to pull through another one inside itself.

Up until now, your custom content could be just a standard web document – http://www.yourwebsite.com/yourpage.html etc.

From October 1st, any content being pulled through MUST (I repeat, MUST) come from a secure server. A web document coming from a secure server has the prefix https:// and has an SSL Certificate – this ensures that communication between the server and your browser are secure. It stops people spying on you and nicking your information basically!

According to Facebook, this is not optional. You now HAVE to have it.  So if you are hosting your own app/page and you don’t have this set up on your server, then your custom page could well go down.

Only Affects Custom Pages/Apps

Note: It’s not going to be your whole Facebook that goes down – your wall etc will be undamaged, but any clever bits you’ve added on will be doomed if you haven’t made the necessary preparations.

What can you do?

1. If you are hosting your own apps on your own server or with a webmaster – get in touch with them immediately and see if your server is already set up with https://  If not, get them to sort it pronto! You need to then edit the Facebook app canvas URL to pull this through.
2. If you are using a third party provider within Facebook – sit tight and cross your fingers! We don’t know which ones will be unchanged and which ones might go down.
3. If you want a Facebook app/page built that will be secure, engaging, and professional – then contact us

When I’m not busy writing about Social Media, one of the other main things I do is promote club and live music events in a local venue.  I’ve been doing this part-time for almost 10 years now and I still love it – though nowadays I’m more excited by the behind the scenes stuff than swanning around trying to look cool… honest!

So yesterday I had to go to the University of Brighton Freshers Fair and represent my nights. If you’ve ever been to a Freshers Fair (which I’m betting most of you have), then you will know it is a manic free-for-all of students trying to get loads of goodies – reminiscent of the classic Argos advert where loads of hands are grabbing at the catalogue. Some of the biggest companies around can be found there enticing the new students, including players such as Vodafone & Domino’s Pizza (I got a pre-loaded 1Gb memory stick loaded with music & some free pizza, so thanks guys!).

Last year Freshers Fair didn’t go quite as well for us – we just had a higgledy piggledy table of flyers and posters and no real strategy other than “trying to get people to sign up to our mailing list”.  We didn’t benefit anywhere near as much as we could have from the thousands of new party-minded students – so this time I worked out a much better strategy, and here is what we did.

So our goals were to:

• Show students who we are & what we do
• Have them sign up to our mailing list
• Get them to Like the venue on Facebook

The first point was pretty easy and just a matter of making sure we had the appropriate print materials and loads of cool branded freebies – we had frisbees with maps on, events listings flyers, sunglasses, energy drinks and lots of other fun stuff. So every person that came over asking for an energy drink – the minimum they were leaving with was a listings flyer and a verbal description of the venue from yours truly.

But very few of them got away that easily…

We had created two very powerful incentives and made them very easy for students to do. AND WE MADE TWO MASSIVE BANNERS about them!

• Mailing List Signup
  “Guys! Tell you what – pop your email address in this box & I’ll give you a discount card now, that normally costs money and gets you cheaper drinks EVERY NIGHT.”
  
• Like us on Facebook
  “Right, all you have to do is either like “The Pav Tav” on your smart phone now, or you can use this laptop here and log in to like it straight away – and I’ll give you a voucher now for a FREE burger AND a free pint!”

We made good use of our promotional items whilst getting people to Like our Facebook and sign up to the mailing list.  We could easily throw in an energy drink or other freebie to seal the deal!

We got hundreds of Facebook likes in just a few hours – and the same with email subscribers.

Plus all these students got given flyers and told about the venue – and we gave them free stuff which makes us seem nice! (which we are)

The Bottom Line

So that’s how we did it within the context of a venue for booze loving freshers. But we think there is scope for a lot more.

Example: Applying these ideas in the Further Education setting

Setting up your incentives

Picture the scene – you’re a college/university and you want to attract potential students to your page so that you can engage them with interesting content and hopefully get them to enrol.

First, work out what you can offer. If you have a promotional budget you could produce giveaways such as branded key rings, stationary, USB memory sticks, or anything else you can get your hands on.  Another option is to look at what discounts you could offer within your institution – can you give a voucher for a discounted haircut? A cheap or free meal voucher in the restaurant? This will vary from college to college but we imagine there will be scope for everyone to be creative and make an enticing incentive.

Using your incentives

Think about opportunities that arise within the course of your day to day business.

Do you have a general reception desk that potential students might come to and might ask for information? If so, 1) ask if they have a smartphone, 2) tell them the incentive if they like you, 3) get them to show you it has been liked, 4) give them the incentive. That’s 30 seconds work. As we said, you can have a separate incentive for mailing list. You could also have a netbook/tablet that they could use to log in to Facebook if they don’t have a smart phone.

Another massive opportunity would be Open Days, or any kind of Careers Fair you might be in attendance at. Get down there with your vouchers, giveaways or whatever you’ve got, and get yourself some likes there and then.

Happy bribing… let us know if YOU have any ideas or success using this.

Twitter is on fire at the moment with lots of people trending with #newfacebook, and as usual it’s an entertaining read.  From my personal use of Facebook it’s a certainty that any change in the platform will be met with fierce resistance in the form of status updates, followed by the creation of pointless groups boldly demanding that Facebook be returned to it’s previous state.

One of the biggest changes today is the addition of “Ticker” – a LIVE mini news feed that sits directly above the chat sidebar.  People see updates on what their friends are doing in real-time and by hovering over any activity, this can be commented on/liked etc in a convenient pop up box.

It appears to be fairly chronological and unbiased in it’s updates, looking at mine I am seeing people appear in it that I don’t tend to see in my News Feed (I always had mine set to top news setting). These aren’t people I had hidden or anything like that – just people whose updates were not as… um… interesting.
So here are a few key facts and observations from us at Net Natives

• No Hiding
  Facebook have declared that “You can’t close Ticker”; though you can make it a bit smaller, you will still be seeing live updates scrolling through.  No doubt some users will manage to hide it somehow but there isn’t an official way presently. This is a pretty intrusive change and I’m already seeing people fretting about this.
• Distracting
  I literally can’t stop looking at it. It’s almost hypnotic, and I am pretty sure that’s exactly what Facebook intended.  The eye is drawn to movement, as I’m sure you know, and every little scroll steals my eye away from whatever I was looking at before and takes it right up to that corner.  Then I forget where I was looking in the first place, and continue staring blankly.
• Friends not Pages – for now
  Ticker appears to be associated with Friends activity rather than Pages at the moment. I’ve watched mine for ages and haven’t seen one update from a Page, though these are appearing in News Feed still. Given how fast Facebook is changing lately, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this appear soon.  Though Page updates aren’t showing, updates about friends newly liking a Page and so on, are appearing.
• The inescapable News Feed
  As Facebook made this almost unhideable – there is some good potential here for brands. Users are now forced to have this on screen and hence when someone Likes your page, this will show in Ticker.  Especially if Facebook start featuring Page updates, this is going to be a great opportunity. At this time, if this negates some of the relevance of the Edgeranks forumula, remains to be seen.
• And just on a fun note – Ticker it sounds a bit like/rhymes with Twitter
  Everyone else is saying that Facebook is copying Twitter, so we’ll jump on the band wagon

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.

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.”