What would happen to your alumni community should Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram cease to exist?!

The recent announcement from Meta threatening to remove Facebook and Instagram from Europe due to data privacy issues serves as a timely reminder that a reliance on free social media platforms to host your alumni community could be dangerous territory.

That’s not to say that social media platforms are not an extremely effective way of engaging with your community – but it’s important to ensure you’re in control of your alumni community outside of free social media giants, who essentially have the ability to remove you and your users at any time.

Lots of schools, colleges, universities and organisations are doing this already, by means of their own custom-built alumni hubs, or using one of the alumni community platforms on the market.  

However, if you currently only use free social media platforms to host your alumni community, now might be the time to start exploring your options.

Ultimately when a platform or service is free – the user is the product. What is interesting now however, is that individuals are starting to recognise this and are not tolerating their data being sold. They are now looking towards services where their privacy and content is well protected, despite perhaps encountering costs in doing so. Facebook recently just reported their first decrease in active users since they began which saw their stock value sharply decline (not that Zuckerberg isn’t still loaded!).

Perhaps we are starting to see a movement away from the traditional social media giants?

This in no way means you shouldn’t use social media, it’s a fantastic way to reach your audience, we simply wouldn’t encourage using it to host content!

If it disappeared overnight, would you still have an active community from which to communicate with and engage with?

If the answer is no, this could severely impact not only your fundraising efforts, but also reduce applications to your school, college or university, and result in a negative impact on alumni services (such as career advice, mentoring, or networking opportunities).

Can you afford for this to happen?

Now is the ideal time to start exploring other ways to engage your community.

Earlier we touched on custom built alumni hubs or alumni community platforms that many schools and universities are already using. They are a great way to ensure you are in ‘control’ of your community, however how do you encourage sign-ups? And engagement once there?

The more engaged your community is, the more likely they are to interact with you, support and promote your organisation to others, volunteer their time, and donate to your organisation. All important targets in any development plan.  

The key is consistently providing new content for your community to engage with, which as you know, can be time consuming, and then how to personalise it for your audience? Alumni that left in 2020 are doubtless interested in different things than those who left in 1970 for example.

Marketing experts, and indeed alumni relations professionals, identify ‘personalisation’ as a key trend for 2022, helping your communications to stand out from the noise that competes for your alumni’s time and attention, but how can this be delivered?

By harnessing the information that you have in your database on alumni, such as the dates they were with you, perhaps interests depending what subjects they studied, etc. means that you can tailor content. Targeting communications at specific groups, cohorts or even individuals is proven to be more effective at engagement.  

How can SocialArchive® help?

SocialArchive’s unique set of features allow you to not only store and catalogue the history of your organisation, but turn it into a new channel with which to engage your existing community and attract new members. We can easily integrate with existing alumni community platforms to avoid duplication and provide a seamless service to your users.

What’s more, our facial recognition and OCR features allow any one of your alumni to quickly search through your organisations’ archive to find photos that include them, mentions of them in any school or university publications, or indeed encourage social commentary as users start to identify old friends.

Cataloguing and organisation features allow you to create new content easily and quickly by cutting through your archive to find files which relate to a specific time, event, person, place, or numerous other criteria.

So what would happen to your alumni community should Facebook, Linkedin or Instagram cease to exist?

Your community can still thrive, with maybe a little help from us 😉

If you have any questions about SocialArchive®, how it works, and how your organisation could utilise it, please contact us!