Growing your graduate facebook fanbase

Posted by Daniel Purchas

Well there has been a huge amount of hype this week about the Oz lotto $90 million lottery draw and we thought we'd combine graduates, facebook and a 24 line mega pick Oz lotto ticket to see what would happen.

The Offer

We've been slowly chipping away at the GradConnection facebook pageduring the year and as at midday 30th June 2009 we had organically grown to around 115 fans. We decided that morning to use the massive $90 million Oz lotto draw to see if we could attract some new fans so we walked down to the news agent and picked up a ticket. The offer we had on the table was that every person who became a fan of the GradConnection facebook page would be eligible for a share of the prize money should we win a major prize. With the ticket bought and the promotion created we then pushed out the link to our facebook fan page through twitter, facebook and youtube intensively over 8 the hours before the lotto draw.

The Results

Well to start off with we didn't end up winning a cent from our Oz Lotto ticket which was disappointing. By the end of the day we had grown our facebook fans by around 330 to a total of about 450 fans which would have worked out to $200,000 each if we won the prize. You can see Dave making our official video announcement here:

 

 

Some Lessons

Running the promo campaign was a great learning exercise in a number of areas. Firstly it showed us how hard you have to work to grow an online community and the amount of interaction is not huge and maybe around 2% of people will interact with you on your page. We initially had our fan page wall set to only display posts made by GradConnection and this did cut down on the number of fans who were posting to the wall. We changed this setting mid afternoon and it did increase the amount of interaction from our new fans. The key lesson is that when you are running a page about your organisation's graduate program you need to regularly push out updates and new content like pictures and video even though you may only see minimal responses from your graduate audience. By generating this content and making the page look like there is regular activity you actually provide a compelling reason for graduates to become fans and check back regularly for updates. These days if you are generating social media content it is a good idea to cross reference all of your social media streams with each other. In our campaign we were using twitter to refer people back to facebook and posting videos on youtube which we then posted to our facebook fan page so our fans were coming into contact with use via 3 different channels.

The Pay Off

With the increased activity and fans on our facebook page we've already been able to publicise some IT development positions for a midsized .com based in Sydney and they've made a number of phone interviews with interested graduates. The downside of the day was a fan that we attracted who after we made a post asking our fans to put in suggestions for our next campaign he suggested we kill ourselves, to make matters worse his profile picture shows him brandishing two very realistic hand guns. If you're interested in seeing some other examples of good graduate focussed facebook pages check out the IBM and Bovis Lend Lease graduate program facebook fan pages. If your organisation is running a facebook page let us know so we can sign up to become fans and our GradConnection page will become a fan of you too. Also now is the time for you to claim your organisations facebook friendly URL for example here is the GradConnection friendly URL http://www.facebook.com/GradConnection which you can then use on your printed marketing materials. P.S. hello to our new Japanese readers!


Search

Enter an employer or university you want to find in our search bar.