Using Open Social Networks to Market Private Alumni Communities
Existing open social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, offer aggregated pools of potential registrants for your official Alumni Network. To the extent that alumni on these sites may not be aware of the official site and the advantages of being members of the official Alumni Network, they are targeted prospects potentially responsive to marketing outreach on these key social networking sites.
Setup an Alumni Group in LinkedIn
The primary purpose of this low-cost tactic is to link group members to the official Alumni site. The LinkedIn Alumni Group logo will appear in LinkedIn member profiles, attracting other potential members to click on the link and go to the official Alumni Network site.
To make this an especially powerful capture and conversion vehicle, Conenza recommends creating a landing page customized to users coming from LinkedIn, This landing page would incorporate a welcome and encouragement to join the official site from a senior executive, a short bulleted pitch on the features and benefits of joining and a link to the logged-out homepage. These steps will help provide a clean and compelling transition from the LinkedIn site to your official Alumni Network. If the landing page is hosted on the Conenza servers, traffic and activity analytics can be added to the custom landing page to track effectiveness, click-throughs and conversion to registered members.
Explore ways to participate and create links back to the alumni site
There are likely many members in the unofficial Alumni Group for your company if one has been set up on Facebook. As a no-cost tactic to reach these alums, you should consider reaching out to the admin for the unofficial group and provide the admin with the correct link to the official Alumni Network site, as well as provide the admin with a link to a special landing page for Facebook-registered alums (a Facebook version of the landing page described above), welcoming the alums to register as a member of the official Alumni Network, inviting them to partake of all the benefits that are not available on Facebook and connecting them to thousands of additional friends and colleagues.
In the Future
Create lightweight LinkedIn and Facebook applications for the Alumni Network
The idea: using Facebook’s or LinkedIn API to create a lightweight application that resides on the respective sites could deliver breaking info to social network members on official Alumni news, events, job postings, all linking back to the official Alumni Network. An application of this type, available for download at the Facebook, LinkedIn and Alumni Network sites could help drive adoption by requiring registration on the Alumni site. Whether LinkedIn would approve the use of this application on their site remains to be seen.
Over the coming months, Conenza will continue exploring ways to make it easy for LinkedIn and Facebook members to bring appropriate elements of their profiles with them into the Conenza-managed Alumni Networks, helping to enrich the online communities of its customers and fuel additional value creation opportunities for members and sponsors.