The challenge to blogging more often is finding dynamic, thought provoking, and relevant information, because that is my personal commitment to those who follow my blog. Since I am hot on the trail of improving my social media marketing skills, it should not be too difficult to fulfill that commitment as I continue to explore and discover more about how to use social (and business) networks to promote my business—and, by extension, your colleges and universities.

First, a few statistics to demonstrate why college administrators should consider social networks for connecting with prospective and current students. According to a recent report on social networking demographics available at marketinghub.info (they used Facebook member demographics as the sample population), 84% of the 22 million people in the US using Facebook are 14-26 years old. Forty-seven percent (47%) are currently high school or college students (I could not locate the breakdown of this statistic, but it would be interesting to know how many of them are high school students since for most colleges/universities that is our target market. The report also noted that 55% of these users are female. The short—and somewhat unscientific—interpretation of these statistics is: If you recruit traditional age students, they are hanging out in significant numbers on Facebook (and probably on other social networks in similar proportions).

Until I attended the Social Media Marketing seminar last week, I saw Facebook as my friends and family network. I have tried to preserve that distinction by referring people who found my listing there and wanted to connect to LinkedIn, which I saw as my professional network. I post items of interest about my hobbies and family events on Facebook, while my updates on LinkedIn are based on projects and activities related to my career. After careful consideration—and looking at the demographics on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I will likely reconsider my initial decision to separate the two in that way. Here’s my reasoning based on data pulled from http://www.quantcast.com.

Total Users
Facebook – 90.8 million users as of July 17, 2009 (all are US users)
Twitter – 26.5 million users as of June, 2009 (all are US users)
LinkedIn – 31.4 million users as of July 17, 2009 (10.9 million are US users)

Age
Facebook – 23.6 million are over 34
Twitter – 13.2 million are over 34
LinkedIn – 8 million are over 34

Education
Facebook has 50.8 million users with a college degree (42%) or graduate degree (14%)
Twitter has 15.1 million users with a college degree (43%) or graduate degree (14%)
LinkedIn has 8.7 million users with a college degree (52%)* or graduate degree (28%)* OR LinkedIn college and graduate degree holders could be as few as 2.4 million users

Missing Data
There is no way to know from the available data what percentage of the US population in each site works in higher education, nor is there a way to know what portion of the LinkedIn users with college and graduate degrees are US users.

Assumptions
The assumptions I make about my target population are that senior managers are more apt to be in the over-34 age range and hold a college or graduate degree.

Conclusion
Based on my assumptions, Facebook would be the better social networking option for potentially reaching my target market because it has more users overall, more users in the over-34 age range, and more users with college or graduate degrees than Twitter or LinkedIn.

(By the way, if you are a statistician and my thumbnail assessment is seriously flawed, I’d love to hear from you! I realize it is not a sophisticated set of assumptions; however, given what data is available, it seemed to make sense.)

Once you decide what your typical student’s demographic profile is, you can decide which social network is most likely to reach the highest number of those people and begin your adventure into connecting with students through social networking with that site.

In the world of Social Media Marketing, there's always more to learn!

Maybe you are already an expert in using Web 2.0 to get more exposure or increase your professional (or personal) network. I'm not, so today I attended a seminar on Social Media Marketing and realized there is so much more potential than I am using--or could ever possibly have imagined had I continued to rely on my own limited experience with this phenomenal tool. My next few blogs will focus on what I learned and what I am implementing to improve my web presence. Hopefully, as I share my journey, you will find some helpful information that you can use.

The first thing I learned that I wanted to share is I need to be blogging more frequently than I have in the past. Although I still promise not to swamp my readers with too many blog posts, I am going to use the blog to document my journey into the world of social media marketing in the hopes that others will be inspired to learn more about unlocking the potential of this vast resource.

There are many other things I learned about using the social media marketing tools well. For example, I learned about Ping.fm where I can update several social media sites simultaneously instead of trying to manage each one individually--that tip alone was worth the $25 fee for this introductory seminar even though I now want to reconsider what I post on some of the sites. Until now I have made a clear distinction between my personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) social networks thinking I didn't want my friends to have to weed through my professional posts nor my professional acquaintances to have to endure my personal tweets. I now know about creating groups to have more control over who sees what and where they see it.

The presenters (Eric & Tina Bryant, owners and web designers at Core Zero Creative ) really know Web 2.0 and how to use it to increase a company's exposure on the Internet by developing a strategic social networking strategy. Social networking sites they overviewed included Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and they covered blogging, SEO (tune in again if you don't know what that is), bookmarking, link posting and so much more. Of course, this was just an overview, but I came away from just two hours with some tips I can put into practice immediately...like blogging more often!