Sweet Briar College is using social media as a marketing tool and it appears to be meeting with success. Last fall, the women’s college in Virginia launched what it called “Project Rosebud.” The goal of the project was to increase the number of inquiries from prospective students from 80 per month to 200 per month.
The Office of Media, Marketing, and Communications made a concerted effort to increase the number of stories published on its website and to use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to point prospective students to the new web content. For example, more than 30 faculty members have recorded videos for the website’s series, “Why I Love Teaching at Sweet Briar.”
As a result of this effort, the number of “Likes” on the Sweet Briar College Facebook page has increased from 4,000 to over 10,000. The college conducted a survey of the Facebook pages of the members of the Women’s College Coalition and makes the claim that Sweet Briar is the first women’s college in the nation to have 10,000 “Likes” on Facebook.
The college also reports that visits to its website from Facebook are running four times greater than last year. Also applications to the college have jumped by 20 percent and inquiries from potential students are up 25 percent.