Students Are Everywhere: Why Are Colleges Leaving Facebook?

Facebook Groups may have declined in popularity among today’s students, but social media remains as influential as ever—just on new platforms. With social media being free and >93% of students actively using it, why have many universities stopped creating groups for incoming students to meet?

Why Universities Are Ditching Facebook Groups

From talking to hundreds of university leaders, our team at MeetYourClass has identified a handful of reasons:

New Platforms Are Difficult to Manage

It can be a prohibitively manual process to consistently post content, keep bad people out, and moderate conversations.

Social Media is a Black Box

Admissions can leverage social interactions to identify the most convertible prospects. However, out-of-the-box social media groups cannot pull engagement data and match it to records in a university’s CRM.

Students are Everywhere

Prospective applicants engage across various platforms, so relying on one channel risks overlooking certain applicants.

Challenges with Standalone Engagement Platforms

Due to these shortfalls, dozens of Higher Ed vendors have created their own, standalone engagement platforms. At MeetYourClass, we are proponents of these vendors; however, there is still a major problem: each has created a platform detached from the apps nearly every student already uses. This means:

Limited Opportunity for Organic Growth

These newly created platforms require university promotion (e.g. emails, text blasts, flyers) to make students aware of them, meaning students cannot engage until they are already part of the university’s enrollment funnel. Arguably, it is also less authentic since students are made aware of the platform by the university, degrading the perception of it being a 3rd party.

Building Away from Pre-Existing Friend Lists

From pre-application through graduation, social media serves as a contact book for students—they follow classmates, family, neighbors, etc. For today’s students, Instagram appears to be the main network that stores their contact lists. With platforms designed only for the college admissions journey, connections remain confined to that isolated space; as such, they are only reignited if a student opens the platform, which requires much higher intent than opening Instagram.

MeetYourClass was designed by myself, other current undergrads, and a team of Higher Ed & User Experience experts as a fresh approach to building community among prospects. We followed decade-long trends of students meeting on social media before campus and worked backward to address the pitfalls of social media out-of-the-box. With our social media integrations, we have had ~500,000 students sign up without any promotions or marketing spend. We now work with 16 institutions for the sake of improving enrollment outcomes.