has facebook been worth the effort

[Nourisha]

we are getting ready to publish our facebook profile and i was wondering how successful or unsuccessful other schools' profiles have been. anyone care to tell?

[Aaron Rester]

We launched ours (http://uchicago.facebook.com/profile.php?id=9183556279) on January 7th, with an e-mail blast to students and invitations to a few select alums that our director of communications knew were on Facebook. We had 148 "fans" by the end of the day, and have seen a steady increase of about 5-10 fans per day (we're at 225 now). It would seem that we've gone (slowly) viral.

[Inas Hamam]

Hi -- we set up a facebook group for our upcoming events. Users join the group and are sent a facebook alert every time a new event is added (or is close to coming up). We started a few months ago and now have more than 850 members. We put up a poster at each public event on campus telling people about the group.

We also have an e-mail subscription list for upcoming events but ever since we launched the facebook group, we have had more people joining the group than submitting their e-mail to the mailing list.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7177509098

[Genevieve Howard]

I work on the college level of a large university which has multiple colleges. We have two Facebook groups for alumni that seem useful so far, especially for letting the young alums know about events. We've had them for only a few months so we are still in the research period about how successful they are.

[Peter Woodbridge]

i started a facebook thing about 6 months ago, i think its really useful for putting events and photos that wouldnt normally be put on our website www.coventry.ac.uk

we get quite a lot of new students looking for friends before they even start their course, which is nice

http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Coventry-United-Kingdom/Coventry-...

[Paul Branham]

Our school has a facebook account. It seems fairly popular with recruits and current students. Overall, I think it is a success in that it is getting people more involved with what's happening in our little part of the world.

[Kate Johnson]

I'd love a little more information. If users sign up to be "fans" of your page, do they go on to interact further with you? I've signed up as a fan of a lot of pages on Facebook, but then generally never go to look at them again.

Do you have suggestions on how you use Facebook to keep people actively engaged and interacting with you?

[Aaron Rester]

The way to keep people engaged is to send out "updates" - notification of these will appear on your fans' home page, on the right sidebar, by where notifications of friend requests and such show up. You can also create events linked to your page, and invite fans to those events, and in their Facebook inboxes.

[Deb Withee]

Is "group" the best way to go vs. setting up a profile or a page? Where do you post events in the "group"?

[Mike Henderson]

I would recommend setting up a "page" instead of a "group". Pages have more customizable features like the ability to add html and different applications. Pages also provide some "insights" as they call it. Visual information on page views, fans, wall activity, etc. There is also some demographic information available. You can also send out mass updates as Aaron mentioned targeting a demographic or just to all of your fans.

As far as posting events, groups and pages have an event box and when you are an admin you can create these events using the edit option.

[Mark Rothbaum]

Do you tend to segment your target groups or pages? A page focused more on alumni, another on prospective / admitted students, another for fans of the athletic teams?

From a marketing perspective, one would guess that the information that each of these groups is looking to receive on a page or group is significantly different. We've seen this sort of segmentation on the Facebook group side, but not very much on the Facebook page side.

Does one of these segments tend to drown out the others on a Facebook page? My inclination is that sports fans would tend to drown out discourse about admissions or alumni events (at least at schools in major sports conferences in sports like football, basketball, and baseball / softball).