Patrick Powers

There is no shortage of available tools aimed at making the life of a social media manager a little bit easier, but are they hurting more than they’re helping? Building a social community takes resources — namely, people and time — and any effort to minimize the role of these resources seems to cause nothing but [...]

So what does the roll out of Facebook Timeline mean for higher education beyond bigger pictures and a new way of doing things? Plenty. Colleges and universities around the country are always searching for better ways to tell their story. They struggle with the simple ways to talk about all they have going on. Timeline [...]

It’s incredibly easy to set up a Facebook page and perhaps that’s part of the problem. Credit Facebook with a high level of usability. Any wanna-be marketer with a profile can create a Facebook page is a matter of minutes. The problem, however, comes when expectations for that page fail to deliver the intended results. [...]

Photos draw greater rates of engagement than any other type content posted in Facebook, according to a recent study conducted by Web Liquid. The statistics are interesting in that they confirm what most marketers have known for a while — more dynamic content leads to greater levels of engagement. However, it’s not safe to assume [...]

Recent changes to the way Facebook generates its news feed may have marketers rethinking the kind of content they post from a page —  but they also need to consider the means by which they post it. EdgeRank Checker last month conducted an analysis of 1 million updates on 50,000 pages that influence more than 1 [...]

What does Facebook’s timeline mean for marketers? Will users subscribe to public figure profiles? What’s the impact of the ticker? And what do all these changes mean for page administrators? Seth Odell and I spent an hour breaking it all down on Higher Ed Live, a weekly web show dedicated to digital development and professional [...]

Facebook earlier this week once again changed the way users interact with each other and how they experience the news most important to them. What does this mean for higher education? It’s more important than ever to be awesome. Awesome Facebook posts stick. Awesome posts generate comments and get shared with others. People subscribe to [...]

I love it when a university doesn’t take it self so seriously that it forgets the most important aspect of social media — social media is fun. So kudos to you, Oregon State University. The video description puts it simply: “Meet new people, stay up to date on campus events and just generally have fun.” [...]

It could be easy to get glum on the future of Facebook check-in deals — so few businesses seem to take the time to set them up and, in return, so few people use the service to claim them. So why am I still keen on the idea of setting them up in higher education? [...]

If you’ve signed up for a social media account, you’ve seen it. It’s the box that no one seems to notice. Before any social media site creates a new user account, it’s going to ask for agreement to its terms of service. This innocuous little box may mean nothing to most users when it could [...]