Increase overall engagement.
Offer enhanced support for graduates in a down economy.
Do both while spending as little money as possible.
Those are familiar marching orders for alumni professionals. What’s an overworked, underfunded alumni director to do? He or she can fire up the computer, open a web browser, and type the URL www.linkedin.com.
CURRENTS asked alumni leaders who’ve mastered LinkedIn’s labyrinth to share their best advice for using the social network to its fullest.
Step 1: Create and curate your groups
You’ve logged into LinkedIn, created your alumni association group, and invited every graduate on your email list to join. Now what?
Sure, you could sit back, relax, and let your alumni connect with one another. But your LinkedIn group isn’t a Crock-Pot; you can’t set it and forget it. The most successful groups are carefully cultivated communities that require constant care and feeding. These are some essential steps:
Stonewall the spammers. A large network is great, but not at the expense of quality, argues Michael Steelman, director of alumni career services at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
“We’ll never be the biggest LinkedIn group, but my goal is to be the most connected,” he explains.
That starts by making sure the members in your LinkedIn group belong there. Group administrators should use a verification process to confirm a potential member’s relationship (graduate, student, faculty member, parent, etc.) to the institution, says Christina Allen, LinkedIn’s director of project management. This keeps out headhunters and spammers.
Villanova University uses trained student workers to vet members for its LinkedIn group, which has more than 11,000 members. Kevin Grubb, assistant director of student services for the Pennsylvania institution’s career center, says a staff member typically responds to membership requests within 24 hours. To speed up the process, those who have a Villanova email address are automatically approved.
Plan content with care. What institutional updates, if any, will you share on your LinkedIn page? How often should you post, and what kind of discussions should you prompt?
For starters, don’t overwhelm alumni with institutional news or fundraising solicitations, GW’s Steelman says. Facilitate discussions related to professional development and members’ shared experiences at your institution. Use Steelman’s three guidelines for productive and vibrant LinkedIn exchanges:
Make sure discussion questions are, in fact, questions. And make sure they’re relevant. A graduate asking for tickets to Saturday’s basketball game? LinkedIn’s not the venue. A student asking for advice about courses an aspiring lawyer should take? Perfect.
Questions should take two minutes to answer—max. Professionals can’t spend much more time than that on LinkedIn. You don’t want your successful alumni to consider your LinkedIn group a waste of time. They won’t come back if they do.
Ask volunteers to post questions. Consider enlisting a trusted alumni volunteer instead of a staff member to post questions. Graduates probably would rather speak with one another than with you.
Keep faithful watch. Customer service counts. Answer questions and respond to comments promptly, preferably within one business day. Some colleges, universities, and schools assign staff to do this. Others rely on alumni volunteers to handle tasks on a fill-in basis.
Steelman monitors the GW Alumni Association’s LinkedIn group and keeps the primary discussion board focused on topics relevant to career development and the GW community. He diverts job opening and event announcement posts to the tabs on the LinkedIn group’s page that are directly related to those matters.
Creating subgroups also can help streamline your group’s primary LinkedIn discussion board. Last December, Grubb and his colleagues created the VU Alumni and Student Mentoring subgroup—a place for alumni and students to request and dispense professional knowledge. The subgroup already is yielding results: One week after a 2013 graduate submitted a post, more than 10 alumni contacted her offering advice, job leads, and professional connections.
Step 2: Move from virtual to reality
Your LinkedIn alumni group offers a boatload of career resources for graduates. But there’s no substitute for a personal email exchange, a telephone conversation, or an in-person meeting when alumni look to advance their careers.
LinkedIn can facilitate those interactions because its data is likely more up-to-date than your proprietary alumni database; many graduates will update postgraduate study and job information on LinkedIn before they think of their alma maters. LinkedIn also offers easy search options.
“When you look up alumni [in the institutional database], you can’t search by major or occupation,” says Gretchen Edwards, assistant director of digital engagement in alumni services at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. “Those are things that, in 2013, you’d expect to be able to search. We see LinkedIn as providing that service for us and for our alumni.”
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