Social media in the context of academic marketing: Case study: Evaluation of the Umwelt-Campus campaign

Recently, more and more German universities have decided to pursue an active marketing strategy for student recruitment. Given the fact that the target group of these marketing efforts, i.e. potential students, belong to the generation of so-called "digital natives“, it seems indisputable that the integration of social media channels in academic marketing campaigns is indispensable. German institutions of higher education have increasingly been acknowledging this trend by creating official profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube or by hosting a blog. Looking at this process from a longterm perspective, this should be considered as a first phase. As online activities are becoming more professional and habitual, a second phase has to be initiated: monitoring and evaluation. In this paper we present the results of the evaluation of a university social media marketing campaign, namely the campaign of our university, which was launched in May 2011. Now, seven months later we carried out a survey among new students to evaluate their acceptance, feedback and interaction. In this paper we discuss how the use and requirements of participants have changed over just a few months, as well as how different platforms serve different needs and target groups. In addition, we will argue that continuous monitoring and analysis of social media activities and usage is essential when carrying out successful academic marketing.