How Johns Hopkins has become a leader in social media use for admissions


DC: There’s two ways you can go when discussing the admissions process.  There’s the selection process, and then there’s the recruitment and marketing process.

In terms of selection, I don’t think social media has changed us one bit. I know there are stories all the time about schools that are looking at students social media profiles, searching them on Google and Facebook. We don’t do that. We don’t have the time with 20,000 applicants.

As far as recruiting and marketing, I think in many ways it revolutionized the way we present the university. I look at comparing the view book that we present to our students now and compare it to when I started here. What you find is much less text, many more pictures—but also the student voice throughout it.

In fact, you go through the section on housing, there’s a couple pictures and a couple quotes about students living in the dorms, and there is this huge box about “go online to the Hopkins Cribs videos series.” I don’t think social media replaces print media especially. The parents want the view book, but the ability to continue the story online has really been a strategy we’re focusing on here.

Daniel Creasy is currently the Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. He has been in admissions at Johns Hopkins for the past eight years, specializing in social media marketing and outreach. He was one of the first admissions counselors to use a personal blog as a form of outreach.  Creasy coordinates the nationally recognized Hopkins Interactive social media platform.

StudentAdvisor.com is the home of the Top 100 Social Media Colleges rankings. All of its information, guides, and tools are free to the public.

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