The role of social media in college recruiting
The growth of online social media creates new opportunities and challenges for recruiting prospective college students. Many college age individuals are daily users of one or more forms of social media. This creates important new communications channels for student recruiting and retention. Colleges need to understand how students utilise social media and how they can best use it to connect with future and current students. This paper overviews the opportunities and risks that social networks bring to higher education and describes the results of an online survey on social media usage that was sent to 2,844 admitted freshmen admitted to a mid size US public university. The majority 56% of survey respondents reported that social media was helpful in making their college decision. Facebook was the most popular social media site, with 89.9% checking it at least weekly. Over three quarters 76.5% of the respondents connected to at least one of the university's Facebook groups.
Int. J. Web Based Communities