Summarizing Article

The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: 
A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education

Social media is a very powerful platform and currently become more useful for higher education. Social media involve socializing and networking online through words, pictures and videos. Social networking is one aspect of the social media, where individuals can share ideas, interests, or are looking to meet people with similar ideas and interests. There are few social networking communities such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Twitter, and del.icio.us. These social networking communities have their own functions.

There was a survey made by higher education Web, marketing and communication professionals that subscribed to the uweb, HighEdWeb and SUNY CUADnet listservs about their university’s use of social media in July 2008. Based on the survey result, college’s or university’s that have an official MySpace page report 60% of their marketing, communications, public relations office maintains it with mixed reasons–the highest reported being recruitment (33.33%). The majority also reports spending 1-4 hours/week maintaining it. Of the 42 responders reporting to have an official Twitter account for their college, 50% of them say it is updated by their marketing/communications/public relations office. The majority update their status 1-4 times/week.

Although these social networking are very useful, there are still some concern about it, which are loss of controls, time commitment, information overload and even anyone can create an "official" account for your universities.