Consulting students through social media instead of face-to-face

Do students want to engage with higher education management through social media? Many don't, but some do.

My team and I are in the midst of building a case that my institution should build a new residence. To raise awareness of our vision and to seek input from our students we elected to use social media as the primary medium to consult with students and the community. We set up a blog and are using the #newUWrez hashtag to organize the discussion on Twitter.

I've wrestled with the idea of how to engage with students on Twitter in earlier posts - Twitter, a new way to serve students and Tweet students or not?  In the current #newUWrez discussion I've been able to interact with 30 or so students. My staff have overheard students talking about our consultation efforts in our student centre. Furthermore, students have shared comments in a few other forums, like Facebook, despite the fact that we made the choice to not actively use other social media tools.

These efforts have allowed me to engage a small number of students but, perhaps more importantly, it has given me insight into a set of tactics that can improve how I use social media in my work. The principles of our approach would seem to be:

1. Identify an issue that is important to students (eg. residence design), 
2. Break the issue into a few different topic areas (eg. We developed a calendar), 
3. Provide content to frame the discussion and material for students to comment on (eg. Wepps' Housing Blog) and
4. Be active in the discussion on Twitter. I've tried to be on Twitter two or more times each day. 

We still have a few weeks of consultation planned so I still have more to learn. Have you seen an institution or someone in student affairs use social media effectively to engage with students? If so, please share examples here so we can learn together.

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