The case for LinkedIn in Higher Ed marketing

LinkedIn is a large part of the 3 Enrollment Marketing Digital Roadmap, a presentation I do for all of our 3E partners. I spend at least 20 minutes on a shorter version. And I did a 30-minute video on it for faculty.

LinkedIn AUTOMATICALLY subscribes students and alumni to the Company Page, so it often has the highest number of followers of any of the platforms on the roadmap.

While some users consider it at best as a Rolodex and others view it as something you have to do quarterly — many people use it, but not daily. While almost a billion people have a LinkedIn profile, and 200 million of them are Americans, it is still the least-used social media platform,

However, there is potential. Especially for higher education marketing.

LinkedIn has awesome Data

Did you know that according to LinkedIn data, there are 706 alumni of?Rutgers University working at Google? Of the 180K Volunteers with a LinkedIn profile, 511 work at Amazon. (These would make good tweets, especially since there are dozens of majors represented.)

Search for CEO to see how many alumni have CEO in their profile. Teacher. Programmer. Founder. You can tell an outcomes story using the data from LinkedIn. If the school really wanted to push a program or a major, using the data from the LinkedIn Alumni tool is a good start.

All of the people on it

LinkedIn has most of your alumni, many of your young alumni. Enrollment marketing people can contact alumni in the places they are visiting and ask them to join them. Contact them in advance. I am going to be at this high school, want to join us and talk about your experience?

You can have actual alumni talking about their actual experience at the school. Remember, you can search by city. It is a public alumni directory, sorted by location, job function, and/or major.

LinkedIn is a place to share outcomes

A simple Google Alert or a complicated social listening alert will pull up alumni outcomes like people joining boards, getting new jobs, and doing new things. Post about it. Tag the alum in the post. That is the school celebrating the alumni for being awesome. Just a great social moment for schools. Note: when I worked at a school. I would always reach out to the person whom I was going to tag and ask them to connect. “Ii, I want to share your recent employment news and I want to tag you, congratulations.”

If the person was on a board or getting a senior position, I would then forward the post to the director of the annual fund.

LinkedIn offers Alumni events

Many schools have their own alumni feeds. An alumni Facebook group. An alumni Twitter feed. But LinkedIn collects all of your alumni. Rutgers has 277K alumni who follow the page. Mississippi State University has 106K alumni followers.

LinkedIn added events. So eventually the Rutgers New York City get-together can be added as an event on LinkedIn and on iModules. This is useful for off-campus events, tailgates, and more. Every away game can be an event, especially for some of the less high-profile sports. LinkedIn will send it to your alumni!

Add the Alumni Magazine?

The feature on LinkedIn called documents lets schools upload PDFs like the alumni magazine. One can even leaf through them on the platform. It is a gorgeous look that makes it seem like Issu. LinkedIn doesn't always have the best UX for people, but this one is really good.

Talk to advancement/development

I’d talk to advancement and see about how to use it to increase engagement from alumni. If a major gift officer is assigned to someone who just joined a board, add their news, tag them, then send the post to the gift officer. It might help.

This might not be an enrollment platform (although it is for graduate enrollment), but it will free up some space on Facebook and Instagram for enrollment messages and will encourage your school to not have alumni feeds.

This is the alumni feed.

What do you think? Where does LinkedIn fit into your strategy?

This is one of the platforms we'll talk about at The Institute for Higher Education in June. Go take a look at the agenda. If you want to register, PM me and I'll send you a code.