CHINA
Who should handle a university’s social media in China?
A growing number of Chinese students are going abroad to study every year – almost 400,000 in 2012, and growing at 17% year-on-year – and education institutions around the world have opened their arms to welcome this new cohort of customers. Many have gone a step further by reaching out to these students on the Chinese social web.Should universities keep these activities in-house or outsourced?
International recruiting is a huge undertaking for most institutions, and communicating online in a different language with a completely unknown audience can be very daunting. So it’s no wonder that most institutions partner up with agencies.
With limited resources, this might be the only recourse, but there are a few caveats for universities on Weibo.
Chasing fan counts
Blindly chasing fan counts will get you in trouble.
This really shouldn't happen at all but sometimes agencies go to extraordinary lengths to prove their worth by buying fake, or zombie, followers. If you think this won't happen to you, just look at Yale and its zombie-infested Weibo account, which is rumoured to have been the result of agency work.
The fact that it happened to a university like Yale, with presumably no administrative oversight, should make you think twice about outsourcing the entire operation to a third party that will represent your brand in a growth market.
The problem is that agencies do not know an institution as well as the people who work there.
Sure, they can pick and choose content that you publish through your website or other social media platforms, they can put subtitles on your videos and post them on the Chinese-web equivalent, but when it comes to showcasing a school at its best, they simply don’t have the knowledge or infrastructure to go deep.
While an in-house communication department can quickly gather and turn around content that comes from internal sources, agencies do struggle with turn-around time. And sometimes, with social media, timeliness is everything.
Real time
Responding to inquiries in real time will be an issue.
Unless an institution sees its social media channels purely as a broadcasting platform – which is unwise and wastes the ‘social’ aspect of the exercise – it is hard to see how agencies can effectively answer questions regarding admission, housing, finances and all these pesky little questions that students might have before they travel thousands of miles away from home for school.
You can come up with a workflow that will allow the agency to field questions to the school and back. But again, on platforms where the speed of interaction is of essence, is this missing the point?
William Foreman, associate director of international communications at the University of Michigan, USA, tells a convincing story of the advantages of running its news desk as well as its communications activities in-house.
"A student from China arrived just around the New Year, and there was nothing open, and nowhere to turn for information. So he reached out to the school through its Weibo account, asking to be connected to the Chinese student community.
“We were able to respond to the message within a matter of hours, ensuring the student had a great start and subsequent transition to life at the university."
Can an agency deliver this level of service to students?
Content use: Platform specific versus platform neutral content?
Many agencies tout their ability to re-purpose existing content from an institution's Western social media account to its Chinese account. Luckily, I don't come across this very often in the education industry – luxury goods and clothing retailers, on the other hand, are serious offenders.
In most cases, content needs context, and without a good understanding of what your market already knows and care about, it's generally a bad idea to follow the translate-and-post model.
But that's not to say re-purposing content from one channel to another is always a bad idea.
This can be a great content strategy with the right curator, and successful editorial teams such as the ones manning the University of Michigan's desk do exactly this. In fact, they have a multi-lingual approach to content that picks and chooses relevant information for each market.
What does good content look like?
- • 1. The institution needs to ‘get’ what international recruitment requires in terms of long-term communication needs. Usually, hiring an editor or a social media specialist for the Chinese market is not enough to address the gap in understanding.
Making the investment of bringing in someone senior who is well-versed in the Chinese culture and business environment gives the project the right gravitas and focus.
- • 2. Have a communications or marketing department that is well-connected to the rest of the university. Universities can be sprawling entities, with many departments operating in silos and many newsworthy items buried under layers of bureaucracy.
A well-developed and well-connected communications team will work to ensure the most relevant news flows up the right way.
- • 3. Students versus administrators? I have heard some practitioners recommend hiring Chinese international students as administrators of the Chinese social channels. I'm in two minds about this.
On the one hand, it makes sense to have students man social channels where they can communicate in their native language, and in an environment where they understand the etiquette.
But on the other hand, it is a tall order to ask a student who has the knowledge and depth to represent your institution to the wide range of audience that your social channel might want to appeal to, to be a good curator of existing content, a well-connected and well-liked communicator, and someone who gets social media and has a keen sense of newsworthiness of events and announcements for the Chinese audience.
In some cases, the line gets blurred between an official institution account and its student association account.
This is Swansea University's Weibo account. But it's hard to decipher whether it's the official university account, or the Weibo home of its Chinese student association. Given there is another student association account, you might deduce that this one represents the university officially, but you really can't be sure looking at the content.
Instead of learning about the university, its programmes, the city of Swansea or the works of its students and alumni, we are bombarded with, what else, Craigslist for housing.
If a university doesn't have the people or resources to keep up an official representation on Weibo or any of the other Chinese social channels, then by all means, sponsor your Chinese student association for their own Weibo account, and make it clear that they only represent the student club, and not the university.
Plenty of universities have student associations, like Sydney University Chinese student association in Australia, and the Newcastle Chinese student association in the UK.
- • 4. When students join forces with administrators. Sometimes it doesn't have to be an either-or situation. In the case of Duke University, students have joined forces with administrators to run Q+As for potential students over Weibo to answer questions from students who have been admitted to its graduate programme.
- • 5. Integration with a Chinese-language site. For universities that are seriously focused on recruiting from China, getting a Chinese-language site up and running would be the next step.
The Hague University in the Netherlands has done just that by using its Weibo account to drive traffic to its Chinese-language recruiting site.