The power of Social Media when interacting with Alumni was brought to the attention of a potential client we met recently. They shared their story with us and we feel it is one the majority of Alumni Officers could relate to.
An alumni member of a Dublin college came to their alumni relations manager and said they were planning on travelling to Tanzania and wanted to reach out to some fellow alumni there to see if they wanted to meet up. The alumni relations manager of course said sure I’ll take a look on our system and see what we can root up on any alumni over there. The current system being used is one which the majority of universities are operating today, and after the Alumni Relations Manager searched the system, there was no information to offer. Not giving up, she used a LinkedIn group set up by alumni to pose the question and see if in fact there were any graduates in Tanzania. Within a couple of hours she had 5 alumni in Tanzania who were willing to take and email and meet up out there.
It’s amazing how much data is at your fingertips through social platforms and if you can leverage that to your advantage, you will inevitably make your task much easier, your time more productive and less costly.
A real difficulty for any Alumni Relations Manager, as I’m sure they will tell you, is keeping their alumni audience continually engaged. No doubt previous channels like email, print, telemarketing, events, and web are effective when used in the right context – with someone who is willing to listen. However, it’s very difficult to maintain that engagement on a large scale through those mediums without inevitably annoying some people.
The introduction and adoption of social media however has brought along with it a really interesting offering. It’s created, as we see it, a new form of digital newspaper tailored specifically to that person’s interests. Today with these social mediums, Alumni can skim through their newsfeed and quickly choose what content they want to engage with and read just like you would with a newspaper. Therefore, it provides you with a medium allowing you to push content to tailored groups or all your followers and only those who are interested in that content can engage with it.
For that reason and many more; we stress to all clients how important social is and why each must make sure to have not a good, but the best social presence.
KonnectAgain 
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