The once-dorky professional social network has changed – and it’s growing. It’s also an overlooked source of insightful organic marketing. Especially if you’re strong in one particular area: alumni connections.
LinkedIn: All grown up
LinkedIn turns 21 in 2024, and it’s certainly matured as a platform. It’s become a very different tool than it was at launch, and new features continue to roll in. But do schools really need to pay attention?
Definitely. First, LinkedIn provides a searchable, easy to navigate database of your alumni and their current professional roles – if only you can stay connected with your alums. Second, while students are more interested in their Snap streaks and what’s trending in their corner of TikTok right now, these same young adults will soon be joining the world LinkedIn represents. But most will graduate without critical job-seeking skills like personal networking, resume writing, and interviewing.
LinkedIn offers independent schools a tool that can help students achieve a strong and early professional start with the support of their school’s alumni network, along with a bonus opportunity to work on some of those missing job skills. Your school’s marketing and alumni offices also get a chance to collaborate in crafting this program and it’s delivery to meet the needs of the student body.
Where Parents Are
Parents of prospective and current students (as well as alumni parents) have good reason to be scoping out your school’s LinkedIn page. Alumni success stories are proof of your institution’s ability to produce the kinds of graduates you promise. LinkedIn automatically assembles lists of the companies, industries, and geographies in which your connected alumni work. LinkedIn makes it easy to visualize all kinds of data about your alumni network – what they’re up to, what they studied, what their skills are, and whom they work for.
Parents are likely to see these alumni networks as a powerful tool for placing their own students in the right circles for success, helping them access internships and early-career jobs with organizations they hold in high regard.
You might think that LinkedIn is only relevant to folks looking for a job right now. But parents have every incentive to seek out your school there: the best advertising is an alumni success story. And a robust presence on LinkedIn with a strong alumni network constitutes a buffet hundreds or even thousands of those success testimonials. Each connection in the alumni network is a success story for your school. That network of humans is important: both for the stories it holds that stand as a testament to your institutional success, and for the real-world threads of the web of support that will be there to launch future careers and initiate life-altering professional connections.
The LinkedIn Alumni Tab
LinkedIn quietly rolled out an Alumni tab for School/University accounts in recent years. I’ll be honest that I didn’t immediately notice it, but you probably didn’t either unless you look at a lot of university pages.
If your school’s LinkedIn page is still set up as a Company, you’ll definitely want to follow the instructions at the bottom of this linked help article and submit a request to LinkedIn to convert your school’s page to a “school” account, so that you can make use of these new features.
In the example Alumni tab from Hampshire College (my alma mater), you can see that users can browse aggregated data across a half dozen or so categories. That data is also searchable, filterable by year, and clickable.
Imagine that you’re a current Hampshire student (or their helpful and involved parent). You’re interested in finding a recent-but-established alumni to reach out to for an internship, and you’re looking for connections in the NYC Metro area who are working in film and television. There are a number of approaches you could take to explore the school’s LinkedIn alumni data. If I navigate first to the “Where they live” column and click on New York City Metro Area, and then click on Film and Television in the “What they studied” column, that will filter down the alumni shown when I scroll down past the data graphs. This section, labelled “People You May Know” will show LinkedIn profiles of alumni that match your criteria. Names appear to work as keyword search terms, if you know the person you’re trying to connect with. Adding a start and end-year filter can help you find alumni at the right stage of their post-graduate lives for your goals.
Skills Students Need
Students today miss out on many life skills that a high school education used to cover. Surprisingly, digital literacy – file management, typing, desktop computing, finding and vetting information, staying safe online, or understanding why it matters that they’re able to present themselves professionally and manage their digital reputations – is becoming a major gap for today’s students.
To support, connect, and better-prepare freshly minted alums, consider hosting a senior- or young-alum career skills night and encourage participants to create a LinkedIn account. As a collaboration between IT, computer science, and advancement, help your seniors review and catalog their resume skills—and guide them in how to frame their work and volunteer experiences. These tasks build digital literacy skills, grow the school’s network, and connect your students with the past, present, and future of your school and its alumni.
One effective way to structure this task might be special programming for seniors in their final semester. But, you could also create a similar program in a meetup, webinar, or mailing for young alumni.
Bottom Line: Strong Connections Win
Build your alumni network, support applicant recruiting, and nourish your school’s brand through active engagement on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is growing, and now is the time. Don’t miss your chance to grow your school’s presence and alumni network by making sure young alumni get connected early in their collegiate lives and careers. And while you’re doing that, make sure it’s an experience that directly benefits your students, leaving them better equipped for what lies ahead.