AgencyNext specializes in social media platforms tailored for the unique needs of higher education. Whatever your objective, we can develop a social media platform to meet your need.
Want to use blogs as a classroom teaching tool, we can help. Want a more open community blog for students, faculty, staff, and potential applicants, we have experience doing just that – and with one of the leading institutions in the United States. Want to maximize exposure but fear the risks and liabilities? We can give you a range of strategic and tactical options that protect and accelerate your brand and reputation.
Improve Your Competitive Position
As you know, higher education is a highly competitive business. Unlike static websites that cost a fortune, look very nice, but generate little traffic and few returning visitors, social media options engage your audience and foster an ongoing conversation on the themes and values about which you care the most. In fact, social media recurring visitor participation is more compelling – and costs significantly less – that all other forms of traditional messaging such as direct mail, print advertising and radio. That’s because your audience in particular has grown immune to paid advertising messaging, including pay-per-click advertising pushed at them by search engines. Instead, your audience is going online and finding forums, blogs, chat rooms, message boards and the like in search of others in their peer group which they trust to provide more authentic information, more transparently than polished, institutional messaging.
Moreover, traditional messaging takes time. Social media options, in contrast, are immediate, 24×7, permanent, and can be global in reach, all over an Internet that’s free.
Augment Your Public Relations Campaign with Something Good for a Change
The mainstream media isn’t very interested in your ongoing good news. Unless the news involves a scandal, security breach, insider academic politics spilled out onto the public stage and the like, most of your PR effort is an exercise in frustration and waste. Your traditional announcements through news releases to the media are routinely ignored. Insiders and outsiders never learn about new academic programs, major on-campus events, policy changes, enrollment success factors and much more through the mainstream media.
An online community changes this dynamic completely. With a blog, for example, you can routinely feature your news directly to the audience that matters most. You need not hope the mainstream media middle men and women find it worthy of their readership.
Also, if you do have a crisis… if you do need a way to reach everyone in a matter of minutes with a critical message – an online community is there every day, all day, all night, for all to access.
Differentiate Your College or University from All the Rest
Few university and college systems have embraced social media wholeheartedly. Most have no online community presence. Among those that do, many of their efforts to date have resulted in disappointing outcomes. There are reasons for this. Online social media sites do require work. Two, many university systems are reluctant to engage their audience in conversation since it implies a loss of complete control. Some have used their blogs, for example, as nothing more than an additional advertising site by cutting off comments. Online communities thrive on tremendous content and variety, which some institutions have found difficult to sustain. We help you meet all of these issues and have proved that the outcome can be significantly more potent – at less cost in time, money and energy – than any single other messaging tactic you’re using today.
The right online community distinguishes you as an open institution welcoming of the comments and views of your constituency. A lasting social media site builds a tremendous archive of useful information and debate. A college or university with an open online community is saying it has the utmost confidence in its system, its offerings, its faculty and its students. If you feel that way and your institution does not have an online social media site, you’re missing the most outstanding communications technology opportunity of this century to reach your audience where they congregate and seek conversations on matters of shared interest by their peer group.
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Call or email us anytime with any questions you may have about these services. This is what we do full time, all the time, and we love to talk about it.
