Social media accounts of Xamk

Last semester, we had social media marketing class which we had a task of having social media account to promote our school. This raised a question in my head. How is our school using social media? I checked Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Since I do not use Facebook, I did not check what is going on there and it is quite difficult to find the twitter and LinkedIn accounts if you don’t know the specific link to them. So, this article will be focused on Instagram usage of our school’s official social media account.  

First of all, the whole Instagram account is used in Finnish. I have gone quite down to see old posts and I found only 1 English post. To criticize this behavior, we would first need to understand the reason for the existence of the account. It seems to be like it is a source for Finnish students to know and see what is going on around the school and posts about the events that are taking place in it. Something else to comes to my mind with same reason to exist. The Insider. 

We are doing this already for our students in English and I can understand that they would want to keep a source in Finnish as well. But, to me, this seems like huge waste of opportunity. First, I would like to make an offer to our Finnish students in Kouvola Campus. They all can join to Insider, and even they can create a new weekly magazine that would be in Finnish. I am quite sure our teachers would help them to create such a content in the school since the Insider is having problems to reach out to Finnish students. In my opinion, it is not necessary to create a Finnish magazine, but it would be a good addition if we had some Finnish students that write with us. They would encourage their friends to read the magazine which would end up in a good result for The Insider but more importantly, the social media would be freed from this waste. What do I mean by waste? Social media is one of the biggest weapons in our time to reach out to people. To give an example, it is the best way to organize an event for helping in a difficult situation. In Turkey, there have been recently an earthquake and a Turkish NBA player Cedi Osman made a post to help the effected of the earthquake and in very short time they raised this huge amount of help. This example is very small one to show how social media can be used to reach out new people. 

If social media is used to reach out to different people in different places of the world, I believe the numbers of applicants would be raised in future. Which would end up with a result of higher quality students and contents in our school. This is easy to say, but hard to accomplish. So, I have been brainstorming about it and made an idea how to achieve this. What came to my mind is that we have brand ambassadors. I think our teacher would be willing to help this since some of them teach about this kind of marketing strategies. The idea is that the social media accounts will be given to brand ambassador to use. The students must be chosen very precisely to achieve the goal here. They must be from different countries and active social media users. They must know the social media tags in their country to use them. What will they do? They will share positive posts about their life in our school and the city they study. They will try to reach out more people in their country and create a question in people’s mind in the country. What is this Xamk? When this question is raised, our school must be reachable which can be criticized. I would like to use an example from another school for this. In university of Amsterdam, UvA, when you go to their website, there is a link for a whatsapp message. I do not precisely know how they use it, but our school can use it in many different ways including giving information to potential students about how to apply and the requirements. This can be used automatically but this is a technical issue which can be discussed by the authorities.  

Back to our subject, When I was trying to apply to our school, I could have done it alone, but it seemed very difficult since it was hard to find a contact. The way to apply was going through different websites and it was hard to follow everything. I am not saying it was too difficult, but it can be made much easier. One way could be using the social media accounts to let people know we exist and then allowing people to use these social media accounts to ask question where the authority that uses that account lead people to right directions to know more about our school.  

To summarize the idea, students from different countries could be chosen to use the social media accounts of our school to post about their life in a positive way and use tags to reach out people from their countries. When people see these posts and want to know more about our school, they could be given a lead to reach right information to be able to apply for our school. In our time, the issue ‘social media is not the way to discuss professional manners’ will not raise which I have seen before. Even presidents in our time give messages through social media today. So, it can be used to every possible way. If necessary, I would be willing to talk about this more precisely. Let us see how the social media usage will change in our school.