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Career services departments/offices should always be engaged (and engaging) on social media. Current students, newly admitted students, prospective students, employers, and alumni should connect and communicate via every single career services social media channel as much as possible. Maybe I'm wrong, but in 2015 it seems like everyone should be taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge, experience, and resources within career services operations.
While everyone may not agree, I side with those who say that higher education career services is a service for life. In fact, for a lot of people, their professional network (at least from a formal sense) begins with their interactions with career services at their institution. And, because so much networking and job-searching is conducted via digital means, the social media channels of career services become supremely important for career success.
Career services shops/teams exist to provide career development opportunities, counseling, and advice for a variety of institutional audiences. If all of those audiences engage with a career services team, the potential exists for communications overload.
This week, I facilitated a workshop focused on strategic communications for career services. One of the questions posed during the Q&A portion of the webcast was about what to do if you start to get "too many" engagements (questions, comments, replies, etc.) taking place on your social media accounts that it becomes difficult to maintain a high level of quality in the presence of so much quantity.
It was a terrific question. Too much social media success could definitely be perceived in a negative way. However, my response was that in the presence of so much engagement, making "the ask" for additional resources becomes much easier. If your office can't handle the social media volume that it's experiencing, then it's time to go up the funding ladder and ask for more resources.
As career services increasingly becomes part of the value proposition for an institution, it's easy to connect resource allocation and money spent to overall marketing and communications strategy.
Institutions that have effective, dynamic, and digitally-focused career services operations have a lot of leverage in the competitive sphere that is higher education. If your career services office is experiencing a substantial amount of social media engagement you're on the right track for both student and institutional success.
How is your career services office utilizing social media to engage with your students?
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