Business Schools and Their Promotion in Social Media

Some ideas how to promote B-schools in social media.

Thanks to my discussion with Ekaterina Inozemtseva at my Facebook Fan Page  I'm ready to share some my ideas on this question.



How should a B-school promote itself via social media? What to start from and how to continue?

First of all, in my opinion the B-school should define the Goals of such a promotion.
What will B-school promote: its Brand, its Program (define which) or its Organization?
Brand promotion goal will be to increase its brand awareness. Program promotion task will be to attract potential students. And Organization promotion should result in attracting talented and highly qualified employees.

Secondly,  this B-school should decide if it works with an agency to perform promotion in social media or it plans to do it on its own.
If there's an agency the School should choose such an agency. Key factor here is reputation of the agency and its successful track record in performing such projects. References are necessary.
If the School plans to promote itself with by its own efforts and with its own resources it's time to think about School's target audience. Key questions here are: what this audience is, what media channels this audience use and how to interest such an audience. After answering these questions the School should choose right media channels and think about implementation plan. Key points here are to define employees responsible for this program's implementation and calculate necessary resources (money, time, people).

The third stage is development of Content and definition of methods to provide this Content to the target audience. 

Content should be:
1) interesting
2) engaging
3) consistent
4) provided regularly

When you are interacting with your target audience always remember what you are doing:
1) listening
2) engaging in dialogue
3) getting new ideas or feedback on existing situation
4) selling your services
5) building advocacy chain (when your clients/students promote the School to others - quite an ideal solution, right? You just need to motivate them to do this!)

The forth stage is Implementation.
Always be ready to react on your target audience expectations, questions and ideas.
Social media is an alive organism and your campaign should also be alive and changing. That's why very often strict plans here turn into incremental and opportunistic approach and initial Content and ideas sometimes change drastically.
Be prepared for this and engage such employees in this program implementation who are dynamic, energetic and adore social media.

There is a presentation that has some good statistics and gives some ideas on this question.
http://www.slideshare.net/emwiles/social-media-marketing-for-business-schools

Thank you for your attention!