Social Media in the context of Academic Marketing — Case study: The Umwelt-Campus Blog

Academic Marketing is on the rise in Germany. So is Social Media Marketing. In this paper we present a concept for academic marketing based on a social media marketing strategy developed and implemented at the Environmental Campus Birkenfeld, a site of Trier University of Applied Sciences. We discuss the development and implementation of this strategy starting from an evaluation of the use and needs of social media of students, professors and other university staff. This survey provides the basis for the requirements analysis for a platform for internal and external communication, whose structure is presented here. We outline some considerations about launching such a platform and we report some very first results in terms of user acceptance and feedback.