Almost everyone involved in promoting higher education is aware that the Internet has drastically changed marketing, advertising, and recruiting. Admissions offices are aware that they need to be more actively using social media, financial aid offices offer online applications, and many recruiters utilize online blogs to communicate useful information to prospective students. However, though education administrators have a general awareness of the pervasiveness of the Internet and social media, they are often surprised to hear the actual statistics.
Online statistics provide useful information when it comes to the marketing of higher education. It is one thing to say that you know that the college-age demographic is online a lot and another to know that 91% of all mobile Internet access is to social networking sites. If an administrator thinks of YouTube as a site where teens go to watch music videos, it will never be used as a marketing strategy. However, that same administrator might be compelled to finance a video about the school's acceptance rate into post-graduate programs upon learning that 200 million YouTube views occur on mobile devices every day. A director of an admissions office at a higher education institution may not know the difference between a tweet and a status update, but may still be willing to approve Twitter accounts for all admission counselors because there are more than 30 million tweets on Twitter per day.
Online statistics provide useful information when it comes to the marketing of higher education. It is one thing to say that you know that the college-age demographic is online a lot and another to know that 91% of all mobile Internet access is to social networking sites. If an administrator thinks of YouTube as a site where teens go to watch music videos, it will never be used as a marketing strategy. However, that same administrator might be compelled to finance a video about the school's acceptance rate into post-graduate programs upon learning that 200 million YouTube views occur on mobile devices every day. A director of an admissions office at a higher education institution may not know the difference between a tweet and a status update, but may still be willing to approve Twitter accounts for all admission counselors because there are more than 30 million tweets on Twitter per day.