The Admissions Office Finds Facebook

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"The students kept asking: 'Do you have a Facebook page,'" Powers said. "It came up so often that we tried it, and it was just a phenomenal success. We use it all the time now."

The school uses its Facebook admissions page to hold question-and-answer sessions for prospective students, led by the school's director of admissions, Cheryl Millington. The first chat, held just a few days before the school's first application deadline last fall, attracted 90 participants, and recent ones have attracted as many as 117 participants.

Niki Healey, director of MBA Admissions at the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business, said her school launched a Facebook site in February to draw more students to the school. The site gets several hundred hits a day, mostly from prospective students who are checking out posting such as video of the 2008 valedictorian's speech or pictures from last year's MBA formal. Students post messages on the page's "Wall", asking about registration deadlines or when they can come to campus to visit a class.

Risky for Tradition

"They're probably not visiting our Web site every day, but they are most likely checking their Facebook page every day," Healey said. "We decided, let's be where they are, instead of trying to change their behavior."

Of course, running an official Facebook page is not something that every school is embracing. In order to have a page that will appeal to students, a school needs someone to update it daily and answers students' questions in a timely manner, Healey said. Schools also need to be comfortable with the back and forth — and public — interaction between students and admissions officers, she said.

"I think social media can be risky for the tradition of business school recruiting because it is such an open forum," Healey said. "People can post information, and we have no control."

Indeed, this is an issue that admissions officers all over the country are struggling with in relation to social networking sites, said David Hawkins, the director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, an Alexandria (Va.) group that represents more than 20,000 secondary school counselors and college-admissions officers..

"I think most colleges are just in the period of trial and error, where they want to have a presence, but they are still feeling their way around in terms of what is most appropriate," Hawkins said. "If you jump into this medium, how do you appeal to students and come off as being tech-savvy enough to get their attention and not appear corny or forced."

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.