Still Using LinkedIn to Connect Grad School Students?

You probably know that the best way to yield and convert students to your grad school is through human connections and peer reviews.

Students considering your grad school want to hear from someone who has experienced it first-hand, and can tell them what it’s really like.

You might be using LinkedIn or other social media platforms as the primary way to connect your prospective students with your current students and alumni.

But did you know there is a tool that is built for Higher Education? 

Unibuddy allows you to make those human connections in a safer, more streamlined and more measurable way. Your prospective students get to chat with an ambassador, and you get leads and data to support your institutional objectives.

Here are 5 more ways that Unibuddy compares to social media.

You can utilize Unibuddy for a targeted audience of students

You have control over who can contact your students – and when.

Some of our partners choose to open up access to Unibuddy only once a student is admitted or has completed an application. Others use Unibuddy as a lead generation tool and have it prominently featured in their digital campaigns. 

It’s up to you where and how you embed the Unibuddy platform on your own website – so you have control over who you share the link with.

Your current students will prefer it

If you are currently connecting prospective students with current students and alumni using social media, this might not be the best experience for those students receiving the messages. 

For a start, it’s all taking place on their personal social media – so messages from future students are mixed in with their personal conversations. If they’re on LinkedIn.

Not only that, but you have no oversight into how many students are messaging. One of your ambassadors could be overwhelmed with messages, or ignoring them – and you wouldn’t know.

With Unibuddy, you get this oversight – it allows you to support your students who are fielding these enquiries, and make sure every prospective student and applicant gets a full response.

The other benefit of this oversight is…

Unibuddy is safer

Safety and information security are at the core of our product and we have several features in place to ensure everyone that uses the platform feels safe. 

For a start, the platform is fully GDPR-compliant, so you can be sure that data is secure and collected properly, wherever your prospective student is from.

We have a whole range of safety and moderation features that allow you to ensure conversations are appropriate and intervene if a student ambassador finds themselves in an uncomfortable situation. On social media, your current students are left to fend for themselves.

Gather data from the conversations

Of all those conversations taking place about your school on LinkedIn, or Instagram, or Twitter – how much do you know about what is being said? 

Social listening tools are becoming an increasingly popular way to get a perspective on what people are saying about a brand or company, but it only shows us what they are saying publicly.

Unibuddy’s Conversational Insights tool is a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered tool that allows you to get to the heart of what your prospective students care about.

Manage your ‘buddies’

Those students that are your best advocates and your ambassadors can be Unibuddies for your prospective students – and with Unibuddy you get the right tools to manage them.

You can support their busy schedules by controlling when they receive messages – so you can temporarily hide them during their busy exam seasons.

You can also see stats on how many hours they’ve spent responding to messages, you can keep an eye on their response times and more. 

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Your students are talking – you know that. Prospective students are messaging current students through LinkedIn, your current students are creating vlogs about their experience on YouTube, your alumni are giving recommendations to their network.

So why not take control of those student connections? Gather the data that can inform your strategy and collect the leads of students who are engaging. Using Unibuddy lets you do all this – and more.

Our mission is to connect peers to make better decisions. Each choice we make throughout our lives shapes our future profoundly. Students thinking about uprooting their lives and attending your graduate program should do so with the confidence that it is the right program for them.