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

Social Media Template Guide

Our MD was invited to speak at the AOC Annual Communications Conference . One of the questions raised was how to create a Social Media Policy.

There are lots of considerations below, but, be warned, if you make it too complicated you could make it too confusing. Natives have a very simple social media policy -

“Be yourself, be kind and don’t do anything your mum wouldn’t be proud of”.

This is something that is dear to our heart and covered in detail in Steve’s post about “Loose Tweets sinks ships”

But if you want to have something more detailed, it has been created to provide you with expert advice on how to make it clear what responsibilities your employees have and what topics are off limits. Having worked with numerous corporations with their Facebook Advertising and Facebook business Page creation we have a large list of resources that would be useful. To view Social Media Policies of large organisations please click here.

Background

Arguably the best corporate social networking policies have balance. They are not so restrictive to deter employees from bothering to engage via social networks, but they do let stake holders know what is expected of them.

Social media is a positive and beneficial exercise for your college, increasing student enrolment and employer engagement. This Template, should help you structure your objectives and keep all of your stakeholders engaged and “on message”.

A Social Media Policy is there to define your expectations of your stakeholders when they represent your college in the socio-sphere, and to help protect your brand from negative exposure by making it clear what is and isn’t acceptable.

Social Media Guidelines

This policy relates to staff members who:

• Actively blog, post or micro-blog (Tweet/Facebook update) on behalf of the college
• Contribute comments, reviews and content to forums, social networks, websites or blogs on either a personal or professional basis
• Maintain a profile page on one of the social or business networking sites (like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter)

Key principles:

Be Transparent

Be honest about who you are and who you work for, whilst remembering to be careful about disclosing other personal information. Disclose your identity as an employee and make sure your profile makes it clear that the views you express here are your own views and not those of the college you work for.

Don’t use social platforms in a cynical way to push a product, course or open day. If you are using your social networking contacts to promote college initiatives then be open about the fact that you are a member of staff.

Your college will not tolerate employees making false representations. Under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive the following has now become a criminal offence: “Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for the purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer.”

Get your facts right

Spend time researching your topic. If you’re writing about college events, courses or news get advice from the teachers/ heads of departments to make sure you’ve got the story right. If there are other people out there in the socio-sphere that know better than you, reference them.

Don’t lie. Aside from the legal implications, people will only be interested in what you have to say for as long as they trust you to provide sound information. (Sony learned to their cost in 2006).

Acknowledge mistakes

Once you have posted content to the web your mistakes have become a matter of public record. There’s no point trying to cover it up so the quicker you stand corrected the better perceived it will be by the people who are reading what you have to say.

Be constructive

If you’re offering criticism either good or bad, substantiate what you’re saying. Saying “product x is cool” or “product x is a nightmare” lacks depth and doesn’t help your followers.

Respect the law

Individuals can be held personally responsible for defamatory or libellous comment, or for infringing the copyright or trademarks of any organisation. So don’t do it!

• Respect the confidentiality of the college its staff and its students
• Don’t post other people’s materials without getting permission, and better still, link to the original source.
• Respect your college’s trademarked names and use brand images appropriately, provide a link to your brand guidelines.

Off-limits information

Be clear about what your college considers to be off-limits. It may be, like Yahoo, you can reference a specific Proprietary Information Agreement. You are also likely to want to cover things such as:

• Confidential information
• Financial information
• Business strategy
• Trade secrets, including those of competitors
• Current legal proceedings
• Personal information (anyone’s, not just yours)
• Offensive, pornographic or indecent content
• Anything that may bring your college into disrepute

Appropriate behaviour

Remind your employees of any corporate codes of conduct which they are already bound by but may have forgotten to consider. This may include a company policy on how much time is acceptable to spend on social networks, particularly for personal use.

Be respectful of other people. Apart from thinking how you will be perceived by strangers remember that it’s likely that content you post will be read by other members of staff and students. Don’t write things that you wouldn’t be prepared to say in person, and be mindful of posting photographs or comments about colleagues, students and events which others consider to be private.

Friends and connections

Who you choose to connect with is at your discretion and the choice not to link with an individual will be supported by your college. But exercise judgement in deciding which peers, contacts, industry figures and students it is prudent to link to.

For Social Media Guidelines of large corporations, including the BBC, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, click here. We hope this guide is of help to you, if you have any questions, contact us.

Credit must go to Econsultancy for some of the information and also Fishburn Hedges PR for their resources.

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.”

If Facebook advertising works (and it does), why aren’t more business using it as an effective advertising or recruitment tool? I’m hoping that this article will share what www.netnatives.co.uk know and help build any companies out there considering using Facebook as a tool to build better campaigns. If you’ve got any questions or further suggestions, as always contact me.  Oh and I am not going to talk about company profiles or social media interaction in this post, will save that for later (needless to say, if you haven’t already begun building your company profile page on Facebook – get cracking).

Firstly some quick stats; these stats are always changing (for the better), but, in a nutshell, Facebook can rightly be called a phenomenon with 200 million active users, 18 million of those return daily. And its popularity is spread across all age groups; 12% of users are aged between 13-17, 29% aged 18 to 24, 30% aged 25- 34 and 29% aged 35 and above.  This demographically even split makes Facebook an amazing prospect for business advertising.

How does it work? It’s like Google…on steroids…

We all know Google Adwords Pay Per Click Platform enables advertisers to choose what keywords their ads would display against in Google search. Facebook have taken this a step further, enabling advertisers to only show ads to those targeted users who would be interested based on the detailed information captured by each user. Like Google, you are only charged when that relevant person clicks on your ad. Turn it off and on when you need. Simple.

The key to Facebook advertising is knowing and understanding your target demographic and making sure you reach them with adverts that resonate and are relevant.

So the first action is to work out who you want to reach and build a targeted campaign against that demographic. Below is an extract example of a targeted campaign to increase awareness and applications for a journalism course at a further education college we were advising. You can see how easy it is to target your campaign against age, gender, location, workplace, education and interests.

a snapshot of what targeting information you should include

Think about the possibilities here for who you want to reach and how they would register their interests on Facebook – the opportunities are endless. Think about the recruitment potential (both direct and branding), being able to direct specific campaigns to users who are working at a company you would like to target (Call Centre staff working for a competitor in an area, for example). Or a graduate campaign for specifc universities which have a distinctive talent pool. What about solicitors who have roots in Liverpool, but are finishing their training contract in London…

And don’t forget this is global. We recently ran a campaign for a global translation business that needed to hire Chinese translators in China. Through effective targeting we were able to pinpoint an ad to the 240 registered users who had registered their interests as “translator” or derivative – to ENORMOUS success…

But, and this is the real meat of the post, make sure that your campaign is relevant and resonates!

Here  are 5 key pointers to remember when designing your Facebook advertising campaigns:

1. Make Your Ads Campaign Specific.

So many businesses make the mistake of creating a general business ad with details of their company as a whole. The more specific the ad, the easier it will be for the viewer to decide whether it is relevant to them. Increasing relevant and cutting out irelevant clicks. It will also allow you to more clearly specify your key demographic i.e. age group, gender, interests.

Create an ad for each specific product/service you provide.

For example: For a Further Education College, instead of creating a general college ad they should create ads for their separate courses e.g.  a  journalism course ad with specific details about that course.

This leads onto the what you do with people when they get onto your site…

2. Think Carefully About The Ad Landing page

You could have the best ad in the world but if the viewer isn’t taken to a landing page that matches the ad copy , they’ll lose interest. If you are recruiting land on the relevant work for us page. If you are a college looking to increase enrolments, land on the right course page.

3. Make Your Ads Emotive

Create a reason for the user to click on your ad. Remember you are targeting ads to their interests. Ask your viewer a question.

For example: A further education college may ask “Do you want to be a journalist?” when alluding to their journalism course.

Making bold statements that grab the viewer’s attention will always gain you more clicks.

Be daring as well as informative with your ad copy and you’ll definitely get a higher click through rate.

4. Choose a Memorable Picture

Unlike plain Google text ads, Facebook allows you to include a picture with your ad. Your company logo won’t always gain maximum clicks. Good pictures of people get more clicks than anything else, but images that closely relate to your product are always a good choice.

5. Be Competitive and Realistic with your Bids

Although quite self-explanatory it is important to take note that you can run your advertisement for a specific time period and can specify the date and time the campaign starts and finishes. Impressions are the number of times your advert is displayed on facebook. I would always recommend paying per click instead of impression as this should be more cost effective.

Ensure your daily budget and cost per click is both competitive and realistic. It may take a certain amount of trial and error to gauge the right bid per click and you should start at facebook’s suggested bid when you first start listing your ad.

Why wouldn’t any business consider this. What stops companies wanting to engage in this direct approach?

Time and inclination. Look, everything I have put up here does take time and you need to put the effort in to get the results (or outsource to a reputable partner who will save you time and will be transparent in their charges). Whether you do this yourself or work with a partner (mmmm and maybe I know someone who could help…), I hope this post has helped focus on the potentials .

So to sum up, Facebook advertising can be extremely cost effective and a valuable advertising platform if used with thought and care. Don’t be afraid to be imaginative when writing your ad copy and choosing your picture and monitor your click through rate carefully as this will be a good indicator for how well your ads are performing and how much you should bid per ad. If you want more detailed help with setting up a facebook advertising campaign or want information on our flat fee recruitment service please get in touch.

I wanted to put down some thoughts about employee referrals as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information or help out there for businesses. Probably because it erodes the revenues of recruitment companies and the agencies charge a fortune to put something in place. Well, nuts to that. If it’s worth knowing, it’s worth sharing…

We know that sometimes the best person is the friend of the friend already working for you. You just need to make sure you are getting the message out to that you are hiring effectively to your cheerleaders.

Before you put any referral schemes in place consider the five key elements:

1. What type of people are your schemes aimed at?
2. Is there are defined timescale for the schemes?
3. What sort of bonus should the hires reflect?
4. How do the schemes fit with the culture of your company?
5. How will you promote your schemes?

So Rule Number 1. Plan, plan, plan is the name of the game. The more you put in, the more you put out.
Rule Number 2. Create an employee focus group, ask your key stakeholders what would incentivise them to refer people. Empower ownership from day 1.

How best to promote, what schemes would be best, are league table relevant, that sort of thing.
Remember that everyone is motivated differently, mix up the schemes and what people can get out of them.

Have fun with the process.

Rule Number 3. Give the scheme an identity, a name and maybe even a logo. Make it stand out, make everyone know what they are talking about.

Establish timeframes and cut off points.

Be clear with the message and incentives

Rule Number 4. Promote Promote Promote You can offer your employees amazing incentives but if they don’t know your referral scheme exists you won’t get any referrals. Pretty obvious, really…
1. Cleary explain the schemes with everyone in companywide of team meetings. Keep the schemes on the agendas.
2. Use email, work notice boards, newsletters, whatever it takes to keep everyone informed
3. Inform every new employee the scheme exists when they start working for your organisation
4. Even at interview stage, let your candidates know about the scheme
5. If you use them, send out the details of the scheme with employee payslips (this is a great medium with sales people!)

Rule Number 5. Embrace and use relevant social media networks. I may make this a seperate post, as this could be such a big topic because social media sites are perfectly designed for you to promote a referral scheme.

Take advantage of the fact that many of your employees will already be using them and it is direct. USE SOCIAL MEDIA!

Not only should you encourage your guys to use their own LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook network to promote the jobs and scheme you should at the very least…

1. Create a Referral Scheme Page on your Company page on Facebook and LinkedIn.
The page should have:
a. Details of the incentives offered for successful referrals
b. Information on all the jobs that you are trying to fill.
c. Details of all the methods staff can refer people .
e.g. email, phone, facebook application form etc.
d. Clear and eye catching imagery to get everyone engaged
e.g. images and video.
2. Regularly tweet about your scheme on Twitter making sure you engage with your network.

Rule Number 6. Keep your career page up to date – Again, I may expand on this later as this is a massive subject. Suffice to say, make sure that your career site (or work for us page) reflects the fact that you are hiring and is as clear as possible as to your recruitment process.

Rule Number 7. Always respond to every referral – you should ALWAYS respond to every applicant, but even more so when it is a friend of an employee!

Final Rule. Measure & Review - the only way you’ll know if your referral scheme has been a success is if you can measure all the referrals you receive. Simple.
1. Add all referred candidates to your applicant tracking system, even if it is just an excel spreadsheet. Even if they aren’t suitable for the role you’re recruiting for now, who knows, they could be perfect for a job you want to fill later on. Your candidates are your clients
2. Keep a referral database with a record of every referral made and who made the referral. This will be useful when you want to find out who to reward for the most successful referrals.
3. Measure which methods work and increase that exposure. If you find a lot of people through, say, Facebook, maybe try some focused Facebook advertising next time round?

I hope this has been useful. I think the key message is to give it a go and have a bit of fun with the format. I would love to hear about other ideas and schemes , though, so please get involved or get in contact.

Real quick one this, but thought I would share a little about social bookmarking which I personally use and always recommend to clients as part of their social media strategy. All it does, is simply allow you to save your bookmarks online, tag them with relevant keywords and share them with others (hence the “social” part).

My favourites are hardly unique:

• Delicious – for all websites Net Natives’ Delicious Page.

and

• Digg – a social bookmarking site designed specifically for news items. Users can vote on different links (“digging”) and the most “dugg” stories will appear on the site’s home page. e.g. Take a look at Net Natives’ Digg Page.

Delicious and Digg are just 2 of hundreds of social bookmarking sites including Technorati, Reddit, Stumbleupon and Ma.gnolia to name but a few. We’d recommend playing around with different sites as each has a different slant.

Why should you use social bookmarking?

1. It allows you to view your favourite sites from anywhere in the world, as your bookmarks are on a website and not stored on your computer’s hardware

2. They are fantastic for search engine optimisation. Google’s search algorythm takes into account what websites your site is listed on and how popular those sites are. As websites like Digg and Delicious are very popular, having your business site bookmarked on these sites should improve your Google ranking

3. They are excellent for promotion. Add your facebook page, twitter page, Blog, MySpace page and any other online presence you have to these site as they have millions of users and are an easy and free method to increase your online exposure

4. To improve internal business communication. As bookmarks are saved online it allows potentially hundreds of employees within a business to view them simultaneously saving time, money and encouraging interaction

You’ll see at the bottom of this blog post there is a social bookmarking tool bar allowing you to add this very blog to a variety of different sites. It’s easy to add this to your own blog and is available from GetSocial.

Told you this was a quick one. But hopefully useful. I am always up for hearing about any good social bookmarking suggestions or possible uses, so please get in touch.

Hey, Don here again. We’ve just done some pretty nifty social media strategy for one of the Further Education Colleges and I wanted to talk about our experiences and pass on some stuff we picked up along the way. Interested to know if you have any thoughts or ideas to what we came across.

Just quickly, it’s probably best to explain how and why a flat fee online recruitment business gets involved in social media strategy. Simple really, it’s all about engagement. We use all manner of the most relevant and innovative online tools to help our clients better engage with their potential and current employees.

In the case of the FE college we used our tricky little social media skills to help with their enrolment and employer engagement programmes.

This is, of course, not a definitive list, but if you are considering a social media strategy (and you most certainly should), this will give you some ideas to get you going…

1. Most Futher Education and Higher Education Colleges have banned use of social media in the colleges – don’t, you need to embrace them, they aren’t going away!

2. EVERY College is already represented somewhere on some of the social media sites – you are already “out there.”

3. There are fragmented strategies across the different departments and curriculum areas – they need to be co-ordinated and structured

4. You will already have some wonderful blogging activity with your lecturers and students – capitalise on it

5. All of the FEs have wonderful content and events that can be promoted through social media sites

6. You have a number of different stakeholders involved (different types of students, lecturers, staff, employer partners, etc) and you need effective campaigns for each.

7. These campaigns need to be “joined up”

8. There are many ways to get around the issue of “opt in” for people representation on video sites

9. Most of the FE Colleges’ organic Swearch Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not enhanced to its best capabilities, which can be rectified and managed through an effective social media campaign

10. Every single FE College’s Employer Engagement campaigns would be enormously improved by effective use of business social media tools such as LinkedIn

OK, so some quick things you need to do immediately

1. Work out where you are already represented through social media

2. Create a social media policy – work out what you need it for, who it will effect AND who will take responsibility

3. Get the most use out of Google as you possibly can (maps, images, tools etc.)

4. Engage all stakeholders, the students, the faculty members, alumni, businesses, everyone…

5. Represent yourself on the most popular mediums (and use them!)
a. Twitter
b. Facebook
c. Myspace
d. Bebo
e. LinkedIn
f. Flicr
g. YouTube

6. Link your social media sites with relevant content from your blogs and college content

7. Interchange the content on with each social media

8. Get yourself registered on the relevant social bookmarking sites

9. Create targeted advertising campaigns on Facebook for niche courses

10. Promote your social media activity across your off line marketing materials as well on email signatures, etc.

11. Measure and track activity using online social media tools such as howsociable

And a final couple of points here

1. Be comfortable with what you are doing and who you are online (some sites will “feel” better than others to use)

2. Don’t be intrusive but get involved

3. Be consistent and responsive (get involved, again)

4. Don’t forget it is for the long term, so make it part of your strategy

There was so much more to what we did and found out and I am going to expand on a few things that I think will be interesting (particularly about Facebook advertising and Twitter), but feel free to let me know what you think. Or get in touch if you want to find out more.