eduWeb 2008: SkoolPool, A Facebook App Case Study

Academia Group developed SkoolPool to find a Facebook app that students would actually choose. 87% of kids use their friends when deciding where to go to college. SkoolPool aggregated that information automatically. Students are more influenced by their friends than other sources, except for websites.

90% of students still want to be reached by e-mail. It’s not dead.

Screenshot to come later.

Students are doing your marketing for you, your logo on their facebook page.

Students can see a list of all the students that will be going to/are interested in a particular school. Every kid that is considering a particular school will show up on the list.

Schools can have free profiles on SkoolPool. The free package includes wall, community, events, contact info, but is only visible to users of SkoolPool.

The paid package has community, video, events, third party stuff, and is visible to all facebook, as opposed to just the SkoolPool app people.

Pros and Cons

Benefits

• Enormous Reach
• Access to diverse data
• Ability to ask for additinoal info

Cons

• Facebook is a source of marketing info

SkoolPool basic facts

• Passed 10,000+ users in Spring 2008
• 5,965 active users, from 51 countries
• referencing 1,400 colleges
• New product will launch in September/October

There are over 1000 schools referenced in the US alone.

Age of use ranges from 15-29.

When students add or remove a school, the application asks why.

Some Planned Analyses of SkoolPool Data

• College Preference
• Preference over time: tracks month-over-month the college choices
• Cross Application – where else are they applying
• Conversion Rate – from “Still Considering” to “Applied and Still Considering”

Shaping Conversations

Academia Group did no ads at the beginning, but that didn’t work very well. Eventually they placed ads in Facebook, MySpace, Google and had ads through them. They then went through and dropped little notes into the groups created for Classes of 2012 and 2013, they grew 42% in one day. They found a 2% growth when placing notes on MySpace.

Facebook Pages

Out of the 400 or so Facebook pages related to specific colleges or universities that existed on Facebook in January, were spread over a few categories.

• 307 general school landing pages
• 62 related to sub-communities within a school
• 22 libraries
• 12 student unions
• 8 branch or satellite campuses
• 5 campus book store
• 4 alumni

THe application will be going live on MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Orkut next year. Shooting for 80,000 total users.

Coming in SkoolPool v2

• Multi-Platform
• Detailed profiles
• Voting
• FB Page widget for schools – widget to allow students to add your school from your facebook page
• Preview wall posts
• Notifications
• Video & Photos on basic level
• Student videos
• Scholarship newsfeeds
• Applicant retention insight
• SP.com sister site

SkoolPool will be utlizing OpenSocial so that you can see your MySpace SkoolPool friends as well as the Facebook users.

Research Subscriptions

• Monthly Reports
• Data Upload
• 24/7 support