Social Media Use
We have several visit programs here at Purdue for prospective or admitted students and their parents. Daily visit activities include campus tour, information sessions from various colleges, attending classes, talking to current students or attending on-campus athletic event or artistic performances. Prospective students and their parents can take this opportunity to experience campus life at Purdue. However, those who live far away from Indiana especially international students may not have access to this opportunity. The Institute of International Educations Open Doors 2011 reported that Purdue had 7,562 international students in 2010-11 which increased 13 percent from the 2009-10 academic year. Since most of international students do not have opportunities to have campus tours and experience real campus life here, they mainly rely on brochures and other social media to determine the college which most appeals to them.
In order to develop a social media strategy, the first step is to recognize the target audience and overall goal. In this case, our target audience and overall goal is to attract prospective students via different social media communication tools. The platforms we choose to utilize are Facebook and YouTube because over 55% of students surveyed indicated that they would use Facebook to review a university’s background based on statistics in Ryan Lytle’s article “High School Students Increasingly Use Social Media for College Search”. Facebook is at the top of list of platforms students utilize to research colleges and universities. Within a university, there are a large amount of segments and each of them should have a separate website on Facebook instead of sharing one. Each department has its uniqueness therefore it is meaningless to utilize one website representing Purdue as a whole. We have a Purdue University website on Facebook while each college or dining hall is in charge of their own website to post most updated information