Social Media Landscape by fredcavazza, on Flickr

Chances are good that you’re already using social media to keep up with friends and family, but are you also using it to keep up with the colleges you’re considering? Are you using your social media profile to build a platform to complement your college applications? If not, then you should be. Find out how to use your social media pastime as more than a way to send updates to your friends.

Gather Information

Some of the top ranked colleges and universities in the country are using social media such as blogs, videos, podcasts, Facebook and Twitter to disseminate information to current and prospective students. Following the information colleges are sharing is one of the prime ways to determine what the college is like, if it’s a fit for you and if you will fit in there. Consistently following these colleges can help to provide you with insight into what’s important to the college, which is information you can use to match your personality, skills and experience to with what the college is looking for in prospective students. There is also a multitude of third party sources to help guide you through the application process, taking the SAT and living the life of a college student.

Adding Social Media to the Mix

Make no mistake about it colleges are looking at your social media accounts. You can use this to your advantage by integrating your social media activity with the college application process. Before you send your updates out or upload pictures to your account, consider the picture it paints of you as a prospective student. You can create a successful mix of personal, educational and extracurricular updates to your social media profiles to help highlight you as the student your prospective colleges want to admit.

Steps to integrating social media with your college applications may look something like this:

• You volunteer with your local environmental group to clean up a local beach. You take photos of fellow volunteers and have pictures taken of you picking up the trash. You upload the pictures from your cell phone and send out an update saying you’re cleaning up the local beach and helping the environment.
• Take a photo of one of the dogs at the animal hospital where you work part-time. Send out an update to your social media contacts that he needs a good home. Not only are you helping animals, but it may also help you when it comes time to expressing your career goals and job experience when you’re applying for college.
• Create a video of you playing in your high school soccer game. Post the video to your blog, upload it to YouTube and upload it to your social media network pages to share with your friends and family to feature your participation in extracurricular activities.

These updates take place over time and help to paint a picture of who you are as a student, as a person and as a member of your community. Put your social media to work for you by using it to help you get an acceptance letter to the college of your dreams.