Heidi Rose
4/25/2012
Almost daily, our social media content reaches out to communities of world language learners. This blog post briefly explains and summarizes Facebook marketing efforts for Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy and the Middlebury Interactive Languages Day Academies.
Our Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy Facebook page, managed by Reid Hansen, represents a community of language academy alumni, their parents, and their teachers. We engage this audience by posting photos, text, and videos that invite a response, such as a comment or a “Like” from our fans. In addition to these posts, other features on our Facebook page integrate with our website and marketing efforts. For instance, Facebook visitors can view teaser quotes from the MMLA website and follow links to our Student Stories page. Page visitors can also request a World Language poster from us and become recipients of future mailings.
Facebook provides traffic to the Academy website by sharing articles from the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy blog. In the past five months, Reid developed this blog as a resource for teachers, students, and parents interested in world languages. Blog posts have included words of wisdom from Middlebury College language professors and Academy summer staff. In previous years, the blog came alive during the summer specifically to share news about day-to-day events at our Academies. This year, it has remained active year-round. In February 2012, blog content shared on Facebook and other social sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest attracted nearly 900 clicks to our website.
All Facebook activity helps us gain exposure in the wider network of Facebook users. Each time a Facebook user responds to our page or its content, Facebook shows this engagement to friends of that user, therefore putting our name in front of thousands of people. Currently, our Facebook page has 4,335 fans, largely due to marketing and advertising in 2011. Facebook activity has increased in the past year. For example, each week during the last 30 days, an average of 37 people interacted with our page and 2,333 people were reached by 15,315 instances of Facebook-generated content related to our Academies. Facebook overhauled its analytics recently and limited the data we can view for winter and spring of 2011; but we may compare this month’s numbers with those from last August. In August 2011, our page had 4,200 fans and, on a weekly basis, 12 people interacted with our page, and 666 people were reached by 3,020 instances of content related to the Academies.
As this summer approaches, we will further integrate social media into the student and parent experience during our 2012 summer academies. Last year, the website received over 5,000 weekly visits during the MMLA session. This year, we will tap into that traffic to channel user-generated content between the website, our Facebook page, and the larger social media community.
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