Targeting Students Via Social Networks

If your target demographic is college students, there is no better way to reach this group that through Facebook.

According to the “American College Students Survey” Facebook is not only the overwhelming favorite social networking site (SNS) among college students; it may rapidly become the only SNS that matters, according to research by Anderson Analytics.

Among seven leading social networking sites ranked by college students in the Anderson Analytics 2009-2010 GenX2Z American College Student Survey conducted this fall, Facebook was viewed as “cool” by a whopping 82% of males and 90% of females. All other SNS’ were deemed “lame” by significant percentages of both male and female collegiate users. In particular, MySpace–the granddaddy of SNS’–was considered “lame” by the largest portion of college students (31%).

This Facebook trend can also been when US college students were asked to name their favorite site. More than one-quarter of them rated Facebook as their favorite Website of all. That was nearly a 12-point increase over last year, and put Facebook more than 20 points ahead of second-most-popular Google.

I was interested to see that Hulu broke into the top 10 sites for college students. I have written recently that I believe that the future of social media is in video and Anderson’s survey results agree with this.

Anderson predicts Facebook will also eventually make greater use of streaming media, specifically TV shows and movies. “Seventy percent of college students in our survey said they had watched either an entire television episode or full-length movie online,” said Anderson. “And for the first time since we started conducting the study in 2005, a streaming media website–Hulu.com–ranked among students’ ten most popular websites.”

“There is already a Hulu widget on Facebook, and there are also personal pages for popular television characters,” he said. “For example, Family Guy topped the list of favorite TV shows among college-aged males in our survey, and more than 800,000 users have joined the fan page for the show’s character ‘Brian the dog’. It’s a natural fit.”