Web Marketing Wednesdays – Twitter Best Practices, Is Facebook Dead?, Key Higher-Ed Story Lines of 2013

Welcome to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), Southwark Consulting’s weekly roundup of news and notes from the digital marketing world!  The aim of this column is to provide a regular rundown of key news items and tech tips for business school admissions and marketing staff.  Each week, we’ll hand pick a few key stories that will help our readers better calibrate their online marketing strategy – focusing on everything from content marketing strategy, web presence, to social media strategy, advertising, mobile computing plays and more.

We’ll start things off this week with a wonderful piece on Twitter best practices from Gary Vaynerchuk.  In this online slide show, Gary walks readers through some incredibly useful tips on Twitter etiquette and highlights his view that Twitter is the “one true social network”, terming it “the Internet’s cocktail party” and underlining the value of being human in your approach.  That last point (about being human) is one that business schools should pay particular attention to as they try to communicate their message to prospective candidates.

Next, we turn our attention to an article published by Wired Magazine, which claims that “Facebook is dead and buried to teens” (particularly 16-18-year-olds) and is fast losing ground to Twitter, SnapChat, Instagram and WhatsApp among young internet users.  Of course, the key point of the article–at least where business schools are concerned–is that Facebook still thrives in the collegiate and post-collegiate demographic (18-25-year-olds).  As such, business schools should be careful about diverting scarce resources away from Facebook in favor of some of the newer channels – which despite all of the hype they may be generating may not play to the demographic that schools are actually targeting.

As we ring in 2014 with our very first WMW column, we thought readers would enjoy a peek back at the key higher education stories from the tech universe in 2013 – via a wonderful piece from Fast Company.  While MOOCs are certainly front and center in the article, there are other key story lines from 2013 – such as the use of big data to predict prospective students’ likelihood of success in a program and new concepts around ‘campus community’ where students, area professionals, alumni and more are merged into a single learning space.  Of course, in the world of digital marketing, we can’t focus too much on the past, so we’ll wrap up this edition of WMW with a wonderful piece on the future of content marketing and leave you with this quote about the new era we’ve entered: “Marketers stuck in the past don’t understand marketing is now a 2-way conversation and not a billboard.”