I started writing this blog every day in October 2009 just to see what would happen if I stuck with it. It’s taken a lot of time, energy, and commitment to get here, but almost six years later, I, and I think the rest of the Collegewisers, are really proud of the role my blog plays in our little college counseling corner of the world.
But we don’t do as well in other areas of social media, particularly on Facebook or Twitter. We set up my blog posts to automatically push to those platforms, but that’s a lazy way to do it. Yes, it lets us say that we have something to look at on Facebook and Twitter. But blogs, Facebook, and Twitter each do very different things well. We decided we had to make a choice—let’s either find Collegewise counselors who will commit to making our Facebook and Twitter compelling and great. Or let’s drop Facebook and Twitter altogether and re-focus those efforts elsewhere.
I’m happy to say that Collegewise counselors Colleen Boucher and Chelsea Block have volunteered to be our social media champions. They even devoured the incomparable Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World before they ever went near a post or a tweet. They’ve thought a lot about what we could offer on those platforms that would be so good people would want to come back over and over again. And they’re about to start rolling out content for our subscribers.
If you subscribe to my blog, nothing is changing. You’ll still get one post a day, written by me.
If you follow us on Twitter, you’ll still get my daily blog post. But you’ll also start to see some posts that are more Twitter-appropriate—short, bite-sized chunks of compelling advice, news, or data.
And while my blog will still post daily to Facebook, followers over there will start to see more frequent updates that are more Facebook-ish in nature, whether it’s updates from conferences, feedback on admissions news, sharing of photos from our campus visits, etc.
Much like I said about my blog back in 2009, we don’t know what’s going to happen on Facebook and Twitter. But we’re excited to try, to learn more as we go, and hopefully to share even more great stuff with people who find and follow us.