Using Twitter for Grad School Recruitment

Graduate enrollment managers: your prospective students are on Twitter.

In fact, a recent Pew survey found that 30% of college-educated, online adults were on Twitter in 2014 (up from 18% in 2013), the largest percentage of any other group measured. If you’re not on Twitter — or not active on Twitter — you’re missing a chance to connect with a growing body of prospective students. And furthermore, you’re missing an opportunity to show them that your institution is successful in the digital age.

But their very presence isn’t the only benefit to your institution being on Twitter. Here are a few things to think about as you consider implementing a Twitter strategy:

1.You can participate in industry conversations

By following organizations, think tanks, or companies in specific fields of study, you can stay up-to-date on the latest research and industry trends. (One way to implement this strategy is by using Twitter’s list feature, which allows you to create lists of accounts that you can view separately from the rest of your feed.)

Retweeting interesting articles and research doesn’t help only your institution, either. To your followers, you become a curator of information relevant to their career pursuits. This will not only be valuable to them, but it will also help them to see your institution as a leader in the field.

Sometimes these conversations happen around specific hashtags. If you man the social media accounts for a journalism graduate program, for example, you may want to tune into #wjchat, a hashtag used for weekly, scheduled conversations about web journalism. These sorts of hashtags exist in many fields. And where they don’t? It might be worth your while to start one.

2. You can engage with prospective students one-on-one

For as much as Twitter is a platform for broadcasting, it is also a great tool for engaging prospective students one-on-one.

Tweet conversational questions to your followers and reply to their answers. Thank new followers, and follow people who often favorite or retweet your tweets. These little ways of engaging are meaningful to your followers, which will help them remember your institution as both friendly and responsive — and may make them more willing to contact you if they have questions.

3. You can use Twitter’s search function to listen in on relevant conversations

Using Twitter’s search functionality can give you insight into the conversations surrounding specific topics. For example, searching “grad school applications” will turn up all tweets containing those words — and show you what grad school applicants are saying about them (as well as what competing institutions are tweeting).

This use case is helpful, but there are many more ways to use Twitter’s search function. You can search by geographic location, by excluding certain keywords, by date range — or even by whether the tweets were asking a question.

Implementing a Twitter strategy can help you meet your prospective students where they’re at, instead of hoping that they come to you. And don’t think you have to start everything all at once: start by tweeting regularly, and build up from there!

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