Social Media: 5 Ideas for Recruitment and

Retention

Florence Melton Adult Mini-School Directors Conference

Kelli Brown | January 2011

• Social Media• Search Engine

Optimization (SEO)• Website

Development in WordPress and Joomla!

• Custom Facebook Tabs and Pages

• Consulting• Strategy• Implementation• Maintenance

Pixel/Point Press – what we do

Why social media?

• To teach: Introduce thought-provoking ideas, share valuable resources found online, offer analysis

• To promote: Share your news, testimonials from students, Q&A with instructors and rabbis

• To entice: Encourage new visitors, direct prospective students to specific content, answer questions

Now is the time…

• Target demographic is using social media• Reluctance to join in might become a

missed opportunity• Educational institutes are using social as

a medium for their message

TED: Ideas worth sharing

web.mit.edu

Hebrew U

Who’s using social?

• Most active users on Facebook tend to be women aged 35-65

• Most active Twitter users are 35 or older with a slightly higher usage rate among men

• LinkedIn’s median age is 41 and is most popular among well-educated executives

A quarter million potential fans

• 260,400 active Facebook users in the U.S. describe themselves as:• Living in a city where

Florence Melton has a program

• 45 years of age and older• Interested in either

“Judaism” or “Israel”

Sources: comScore and Facebook

Five Ideas for Recruitment and Retention

• Build a home base on the web

• Create and share unique content

• Encourage word-of-mouth marketing• Produce short videos• Foster an active learning community

Build a home base on the web

• Keep content on your own website or blog• Users can subscribe via RSS or email• Share links in the social networks• Allows automated posting to Facebook and

Twitter, among others• Funnel your market back to your site• Crowdsource – invite user-generated

content• Added benefit of search engine optimization

Create and share unique content

• Snippets from courses• Guest posts from students• Q&A interviews with

instructors• Offer regular features• A series is more effective than a single

post• Stick to a calendar – weekly, twice a week

Encourage word-of-mouth marketing

• Prompt current students and alumni to share

• Build web-based corollaries to local classes

• Think local, act global – connect related communities

• Make it easy for people to shareSocial bookmarking icons

ReTweet button

Facebook Like button

Produce short videos

• Captures an audience like nothing else• Shared more often• Converts visitors – site visitors who view

video are 20% more likely to perform a desired action

• Post both on your site/blog and on YouTube• YouTube is the world’s second largest search

engine behind Google – bigger than Bing and Yahoo combined

Video gets visitors

Foster an active learning community

• Move from classroom to the web to improve student retention

• Encourage discussion between different schools to broaden the learning experience

• Don’t wait for activity – supply community management to provoke discussion and sharing

Key Points for Social Success

• Share – successful campaignsshare more than their own content

• Resist the urge to “sell”: instead focus on helping people

• Before you post, ask why would someone read this? Comment on it? Share it?

• Expand your network slowly – it’s always better to add a new outlet than delete one

Questions?

Thanks and keep in touchkelli@pixelpointpress.com

+972-54-225-7879Presentation available at

slideshare.net/pixelpointpress

Facebook.com/pixelpointpress

Twitter.com/pixelpointpress

Thanks and keep in touch

kelli@pixelpointpress.com+972-54-225-7879

Presentation available at slideshare.net/pixelpointpress

Please feel free to share!