New Report: 58% of Students Value a Virtual Tour On A College Website

Kyle James — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:05:44 +0000

Last week Noel-Levitz released their 2010 edition on the E-Expectations Report about what college-bound students are looking for in terms of online engagement during the admissions process. To create their report they surveyed more than 1,000 high school students about their online behavior and expectations. I’m not going to rehash the complete report here, but if you are looking for that, Karlyn over at .eduGuru wrote a nice summary or simply go download the report for yourself. What I would like to do is present a few very interesting data points and discuss exactly how we address those points.

76% of Students Use Facebook

Facebook was the clear winner of the social media websites surveyed although at 79% it still seemed this number is a little low. With Facebook even this week expecting its 500 millionth user and the entire phenomenon starting in colleges and universities, you would think this number would be closer to 95% of the audience. The slight difference here is that we are talking about college bound high school students in this survey. Either way if over three quarters of your audience is on a channel, you simply can’t ignore it. nuCloud gives you the ability to embed your virtual tour right on your Facebook page. Don’t just take my word for it; check out this example of one of our customers actually doing it.

58% of Students Identified Virtual Tours as Extremely Valuable or Adds a lot of Value

Speaking of embedding those virtual tours we have to be extremely excited to hear that almost 60% of incoming students find our product valuable! It has never been more important than it is today to have a compelling and easy to use virtual tour on your website. I think the big key in that last sentence is “easy to use.” If you try to use a lot of the tours out there on college websites many are hard to figure out and even more painful to let them load. Many prospective students have a well known dislike of being patient for things.

77% of Students Identified Campus Visit Request Forms as Extremely Valuable or Adds a lot Of Value

I very strongly believe that a campus visit is one of the strongest elements in the decision process of where a student chooses to go to school. Any admission office will tell you that if they can get a student to visit their school they can get that individual to apply. With this being such an important part of the recruitment funnel you have to think about as many ways as possible to open up it up more. I strongly believe that an online virtual tour is definitely one of these methods. If a student visits 30 school websites and knows they are only going to visit maybe five of them then seeing a virtual tour of the campus might be one of those important decision makers to keep a school on the list.

52% Have Viewed Videos About Colleges But Only 10% on YouTube

Finally this last data point shows how valuable students think videos are, but interestingly enough the world’s biggest video website isn’t where they watch this content about schools. According to Alexa YouTube is the 3^rd largest website in the world. If you drill down into the data a little deeper then you will see 42% of the students are watching video on your website. If you don’t have video on your website then you probably want to get some up there. nuCloud does give you the ability to embed video in your map stops on your website as you can see in this example. This probably isn’t exactly what students have in mind, but we are already in the process of developing a tool to let you embed video on your website.

Conclusion

These four data points are just a few of the many in this report. Once again I highly recommend you learn what college bound students expect from your online efforts and read the report. Just as we have to understand the data and what students desire so we can build products and services accordingly. It is important for colleges and universities to address these same desires. You can download the full report here »

Download our Interactive Campus Map Kit and learn exactly how nuCloud can help your recruitment efforts. We are here to help.

Now You Can Embed Your Interactive Campus Map in Facebook!

Kyle James — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:11:19 +0000

So this post is more of a transparent pat on our own backs at nuCloud, but we have successfully taken our interactive mapping software and are able to embed it on a Facebook Page! We are excited because we feel this is a big deal for colleges and universities. As recent data has shown 99% of 18-24 year olds are on social networks. As you all know, for most institutes of higher education this is the target audience for at least undergraduates. Also with Facebook now flaunting over 350 million active users it’s an obvious location in which to place one of your strongest recruiting tools.

Facebook has personal pages and groups, but for an interactive campus map the best page on which to include it is your school’s fan page. This is accomplished through using what Facebook calls FBML (Facebook Markup Language). We’ve gone the extra mile to create the embed script for this FBML inside of the nuCloud user interface so all you need to do is follow the three simple steps outlined below.

Steps for adding your interactive map to your Facebook fan page

1. Setup FBML on your Facebook fan page

a) Login to your Facebook fan page and select “edit page”
b) Find and install the “Static FBML” application to your fan page

c) Back in the fan page editor, find FBML and go to the “Application Settings”
d) Remove “Box” and add “Tab.” Click Okay

e) Choose “Edit” under FBML
f) Enter the title of your map tab under “Box Title”

2. Copy the FBML embed code from nuCloud and paste it into your FBML block

a) Open your map through nuCloud’s map editor
b) Choose “Get Facebook Code” from the Actions panel and copy the Embed code

c) Paste the FBML embed code into the FBML box and save changes

3. You should now see a tab on your fan page for your interactive map.

Check Out Live Examples

That couldn’t have been much easier, could it? Want to see exactly what this looks like in Facebook? Here is how two of our customers are taking advantage of this feature. Please check out the Belmont Map and USC Upstate Map.

nuCloud » Facebook