My first experiences on social media marketing

This February, we (as in my research group and I) finally took our heads out of our collective backsides identified a problem. Specifically, we had a personnel survey in our department, and everybody was asked to list some weaknessses that their group had. Funnily enough, everyone in our group had attractiveness in their top 3.

Now, I’m not speaking about physical qualities here. Oh no: years at the gym have seen to that, despite my obvious lack of any talent in that respect. No, attractiveness in this context refers to the attractiveness of the group as a whole, both to students and post-grads alike.

And it was obvious we had a problem. We were barely getting any master’s students. Most of our courses had something like 5 participants, with typically only one of them a native Finn. With graduates things were a bit better, but not by much.

As a part of the post-survey discussion, we were asked to suggest solutions to the problems we had identified. For this problem, improving our visibility came out top.

Luckily, this could be approached like a simple marketing problem. We had an awesome product – our group – that nobody knew of. I mean, barely any of us even had any contact with bachelor-level students yet to choose their major, so we couldn’t even rely on word-of-mouth marketing. The few students we had, had reached us through simple diffusion, i.e. by pure chance.

To rectify things, we agreed to set up a Linkedin group for our…well group. That was being thought of as professional and academic enough. However, LinkedIn is not the most active social media channel, especially among younger students. So, despite some initial opposition I decided to set up a Facebook page as well, and to Tuonela with the consequences. The Youtube channel and a couple of tongue-in-cheek promotional videos followed naturally shortly after.

To top things off, I also advertised our summer job positions on a couple of mailing lists of our student organizations.

And damn that was successful.

Typically we have received something like zero to five applications each year. That’s not very much.

So how many did we get this year, after all this hustle? Well, I don’t know the latest figures, but the last time I checked the number was over 30.

That alone is a 12-fold improvement.

So, this social media thing obviously can work. That much is strongly supported by our comprehensive data. But, all this can be interpreted in a wider context as well.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that we have more information more easily available than ever before in the history of mankind. Still, most of it is never read by anybody.

And that’s a lot of wasted effort and untapped potential. And maybe it’s also something we the researchers should focus on more.

UPDATE: since originally writing and publishing this post, we have been quite active indeed. For example, check out and read about our new videos here and here. Additionally, we took part in the Restaurant day – you can find a post-pop-up report here.

-Antti

My first experiences on social media marketing