For the past few years, the undergraduate admissions office had been in a predicament not unknown to colleges and universities: the summer melt. In other words, accepted students were not becoming enrolled students, resulting in a significant drop in yield. As any undergraduate admissions office will tell you, this is a delicate end of the funnel, requiring a strategy where the institution comes across as fulfilling its promise, not continuing with recruitment tactics.

The proposed three-pronged strategy consisted of creating an official Facebook group page for accepted students, called Class of 2014. This was meant to give accepted students a specific and private space to forge a deeper connection to Loyola; it answered questions and discussed issues related only to this accepted group. Initial posts dealt with very practical next steps type of information that offered real value to the audience, positively impacting their decision to enroll. A discussion tab was also created within this Facebook page to generate conversations, and connect the students to faculty and resources more deeply.

One of the challenges the teams encountered was the creation of an unofficial Class of 2014 page that over 300 students had joined. By befriending the members of this page and directing them to the official Class of 2014 page, the teams managed to make the latter one-stop site for all things related to enrollment.

Along with the Facebook page for the Class of 2014, we also set up a reinforced official Loyola fan page to provide a more generalized experience, draw a wider range of audiences (students at different points in the recruiting funnel), and serve as a first stage in the social media recruiting process. Loyola used two other social web platforms—YouTube.edu and Twitter—to serve as traffic drivers to the two Facebook pages, as well as the Loyola admissions website, and other key destinations.

The ultimate goal for this plan was to set in place social media tactics that impacted not simply 2010’s recruiting class but also set the stage for classes to come. Social media needed to play a decisive role in increasing yield and helping attain Loyola’s enrollment goal of 2050; and developing new resources that augmented current recruiting both short- and long-term.