The global economic recession has had varying impact on education sector across countries. The financial crisis has negatively impacted state budgets, and therefore, education, which is largely state or public-financed, has also been impacted. There are cultural variations too; Asians tend to place higher value on education and therefore education sector in countries like India has been considered recession-proof.
According to International Labour Organization’s (ILO) assessment report of education sector, in many European countries – Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom, there have been cuts in education budgets either as a result of a reduction in overall expenditure on education or only in particular areas of education. In North America and in some Latin American countries, education spending is being reduced in particular areas.
In India, the education sector in private space has escaped major blow; and is attracting private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) funds. According to a “Private Equity Pulse – Education” report by Venture Intelligence, the PE and VC funds have already invested $300 million in domestic education firms.
Education Sector Needs to Adopt Internet Marketing
In the face of economic downturn, the education sector needs to utilize internet marketing effectively to attract local and international students, faculty and funding.
Students joining colleges and universities today have been exposed to the Internet since childhood. They spend a good part of their time being online using multiple devices. They are savvy in using the world wide web to find information and use social networking sites and instant messenger to stay connected with each other. How teenagers and young adults receive, process, and act on information has fundamentally changed. They do research online and form opinions before selecting an institution to apply for admission.
Adoption of Social Media
Recent studies show that 13% of the Fortune 500 and 39% of the Inc. 500 currently have a public blog. It is interesting to note that college admissions departments continue to lead the pack with blogs at 41% of US colleges and universities.
A research report “Colleges and Universities Adopt Social Media to Recruit and Research Potential Students” draws following conclusions:
1. Adoption is being driven by admissions departments’ recognition of the increasing importance of social media in today’s world.
2. Usage of YouTube has also increased substantially. Video is now being used to deliver virtual tours of campuses, virtual visits to the dorms, and sample lectures from the faculty.
3. 78% of private schools have blogs, versus 28% of public schools, and 50% of schools with undergraduate populations of less than 2,000 have blogs.
There is evidence that these powerful tools are not being utilized to their potential. Schools using social media must adopt social media optimization best practices in order to maximize their effectiveness.
Merely publishing a blog will not result in being read by the prospective students. The blog must be optimized for both social media and search engines.
Social Media Marketing techniques
You must create something unique, compelling and worthy enough of being submitted and linked to. Add value to users, including links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Your college blog should be the student communities first source of information finding. Students will link to your social site and tag is as helpful or the ‘ultimate’ guide in that space: for example, career counseling for student community.
Post blog to Social Media sites: Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, MySpace, Reddit, Spurl, Blinklist, Shadows, Simply, Yahoo Answers.
Place a retweet button on your blog articles.
Have a RSS feed of Blog for people to subscribe to.
Make your content more accessible by tags and to add a “Digg This”, “Add to del.icio.us” or Technorati chicklet to your Web site and RSS feed. By making tagging and bookmarking easy for users, it encourages readers to submit the content for you.
Less than.06% of the blogosphere garners all the attention, links and authority when stacked up against the rest of 133 million blogs indexed by Technorati. If you want attention, interest and links, you absolutely aim to be included in that.06%. You need to consistently create useful and unique content.
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