Using Facebook for Student Engagement and Marketing Mark Sproul, Head of Digital International Development and External Affairs May 2012

Where our social media activity has come from Our community Social media marketing Success or failure? Questions/discussion at the end Social media

Established 2009 coinciding with our name change Set up to support induction to university It is now recognised as a primary channel for student engagement It now covers marketing and recruitment and is a key conversion tool for starting discussions We have developed Facebook specific apps to support marketing We have 32k fans on Facebook (about 1/3 from organic growth and 2/3 from our Innovation Challenge) Recently we have had to address marketing vs engagement and audience management We are selective about which content to promote Evolution of ENU on Facebook

Summer 2011 we had around 9,000 fans Today we have 32,000 fans The growth has come from our India Lanka Innovation Challenge Campaign totally off brand!. Response has exceed expectations – initial KPI was an increase of 2,000 fans from India and Sri Lanka. The India Lanka campaign

We ran competition associating the University with Innovation aimed at building our brand awareness Encouraged people to share their ideas on Innovation Seeded the campaign (mainly advertising but also promoted via influencers on Twitter and 3 rd party lists) Engaged with the audience Received requests for additional information Judged responses and announced 2 winners (one on votes, one by judges) Two prizes: An Ipad and a visit to Edinburgh India Lanka Innovation Challenge

20,000 increase in Facebook fans from target markets 742 enquiries about studying with us 698 entries into the competition and 12,386 votes for the entries to the contest Votes varied from 2,151 votes for the most popular entry to 0 votes for a few of the entries 16 applications so far from those that engaged The contest winner Promila is from Spectrum Institute of Science & Technology (Srilanka) an outreach campus of University of Mysore India. Our staff now talking to theirs. Data

Resource intensive Quality control: Cheating. Fake entries. Skulduggery Pollution on our Facebook page Enquiries generated on Facebook The quality of the entries How we keep this new audience engaged with us and what happens next Different approaches for different markets – less successful in the Middle East Things to consider

Success: exceeded expectations Great learning experience Now looking at cultivating the audience and regard them as a prospect group on Facebook Trip has caught the imagination here and in India/Sri Lanka Resulted in visit to the Scottish Parliament to meet with Education Secretary Michael Russell Reinforces the reach of digital and social media with staff and influencers Informing our decision making on future campaigns Better decision making going forward Success or failure

Any questions? Mark Sproul, Head of Digital IDEA, Edinburgh Napier University Web: