Marketing to Students

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with The Guardian, widely regarded as one of the best sources for graduate jobs and career advice.

The Student Room is the largest student website in the UK and Careers is one of the fastest growing site areas. Approximately 245,000 unique users checked out our career forums in June and in response to demand we’ve expanded our career forums  by about 50% adding new forums (listed at the bottom of this post)

By aligning The Guardian’s editorial excellence and job vacancies with our own unmatched peer support we aim to create an unrivalled destination for young people looking for advice, shared experience and job opportunities.

A new job search powered by The Guardian will be appearing on the site shortly and over the next few months, together with the team at The Guardian, we’ll be updating the careers homepage giving it far more of a graduate focus, incorporating more shared experiences of interviews, assessment centers, application forms, work experience etc.

If you have ideas and suggestions for the section please leave them as comments on the blog or else post them into the career forums.

We’re very excited by the potential of this partnership. With the apprehension currently surrounding job prospects, specifically for new graduates, the timing is perfect for something new. Together with The Guardian we hope to take the fear factor out of finding work and beginning your career and as always the TSR community and membership will be at the heart of what we do.

Our newest career forums:

Volunteering, Internships and Work Experience
Apprenticeships
Government and civil service careers
Health and emergency Services
Hospitality and customer Service careers
IT and Technology careers

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Screengrab above from Dius.gov.uk homepage (5/02/09), click to see full size version

We’ve been working with DIUS (Dept of Innovation, Universities, Skills) since the christmas holidays on and off on a new resource for prospective mature students and today it went live to quite a national fanfare.

Mature student information on The stuident Room

it features:

• A map to search for an institute near you and then click for mature student specific information from that institute.
• Written and Video profiles/case studies
• The TSR forum and articles from Directgov and TSR.

Thanks to the members of the TSR mature student forum for getting involved in suggesting content and then by writing profiles that will be really useful to others considering returning to education.

The page will continue to grow over time, got ideas for how it could be better? Let us know.

-J

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I just thought I’d share a few site stats with you.

On Monday 19th January we broke the record for the most visits ever to TSR in a single day (again) with 129,795 visits. Up by 68 visits from the previous visit sat last week. The trend looks like we’ll have some even bigger days later on this week however.

A Level results day last August still remains the biggest ever day for page views with around 1.124 million page views. We’re edging ever closer to this figure again though with Sunday 18th January seeing over 1.107 million page views. If things continue we should eclipse this record soon too.

A final figure I want to share is the total number of visits in the last month. For the first time we’ve broken the 3 million barrier with 3,002,003 visits over the last month. We have to remember this contains the Christmas and New Year period too which saw some very quiet days so we can expect this record to be increase too as the Christmas and New Year weeks stop being counted here.

Overall the site is about twice a busy as the same time last year. If this continues can we expect our first 200,000 visit day during the summer?

RK

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Happy New year from the Admin team at TSR.

The year has started well, already we’ve been breaking records. The busiest day ever was on the 14th of Jan when we had 128,000 visits, 94 unique users in a single day. That’s 282% growth compared with the same day last year!

For those into their stats The Student Room gets about 1.5million unique users a month now

Lots of stuff going on at the moment…

We’re working with DIUS (Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills) to put together a page of resources on TSR for people considering going into education as a mature student. This will be live early in Feb and we have been consulting with TSR users in our mature student forum to make sure we get it right.

If you have other suggestions or pick up the discussion here

The TSR test team have been crawling all over the development site trying to find problems that we can get fixed before we go live with the new site updates.

all things going well we plan to make the latest site update in the middle of next week. The site will have to be down for a while (probably wed evening) to make that update.

The feedback we’ve had from the Test Team has been very positive, especially the ability to switch template colours. It will be interesting to see which the most popular colours turn out to be.

We have restructured the About forum, splitting it into two. One forum is now for questions about Rep and TSR, the other forum is for making suggestions about TSRs development and reporting bugs. This should help us really keep on top of those issues and requests.

Congratulations to the winners of the end of year TSR awards! While its fresh in peoples minds make suggestions below if you have ideas for how the awards could be even better next year.

Finally just a quick note to say thanks to +epic for getting a ‘TSR welcome pack‘ started. It’s got a way to go but the idea is that this could become a simple guide to TSR for newcomers and we can link to it from the email that people get when they register. Its a wiki page so feel free to add anything you think could be useful that perhaps confused you when you first came to TSR.

Good luck if you have exams and essays to write at the moment

-J

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The Student Room received record visits on A-Level results day (14th of August) as students flooded to the site to compare their grades and discuss options.

We received a whopping 108,513 visits, significantly higher than the previous top traffic day which was 92,911 set earlier this year and over double the visits we received on results day 2007.

We were also pleased to see The Student Room receive some great coverage in The Times’ Student Guide suppliment on results day. Click the image below to read a larger version:

Join in the discussion about this instance of TSR press coverage here:

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?p=13863753

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Mondays are always our biggest day on the site but this week we beat our previous traffic high by a mile. We received 64,000 absolute unique vistors, and 93,000 visits on a single day! That’s more than pass through the turnstiles at a packed Wembley Stadium! We attribute this to exam fever kicking in across the nation.

The exam period brings new challenges for our moderator team. Obviously people like to come to TSR to talk about their experiences but if you want to talk about an exam that some people haven’t sat yet there is a problem. Or if you want to talk in too much detail about a closed paper that again is an issue. We have a pretty close relationship with a number of exam boards including OCR and Edexcel who occasionally drop us an email or pick up the phone to bring our attention to a thread on the site that is going into an unacceptable level of detail.

Use your head when posting information regarding specific exams. Do read the posting guidelines issued at the top of threads and forums by the Moderators. As I say exam boards do check the site and they take these issues very very seriously. It isn’t worth getting into trouble over and you could jepardise your own results if the exam board choose to follow up their enquiries seriously.

To quote the person I spoke to at Edexcel the other week:
“The only way for candidates to be absolutely sure that they are not breaching examination regulations is to avoid any discussion at all once they have seen the secure question paper.”

Good luck with your exams if you are sweating them out at the moment!

The site coped pretty well with this much volume due to the excellent optimisation work that’s been done by our developers over the past few months. However we all agreed that we’d got to a point where it was time for another hardware upgrade especially with even higher volume days expected later in the year around exam results time.

So on tuesday evening we added a second database server. This is now helping spread the load of constant database queries which are made for example when writing, replying and editing posts etc. We hope you are finding the site really responsive now, we’ve had some good feedback to suggest you all are.

This brings the number of servers behind TSR to a whopping 8:
* 4 Web servers
* 1 Load balancer
* 2 Database servers
* 1 Index server

You can see what these machines look like and where The Student Room physically lives by following this link: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/blog/the-data-centre-behind-gossamer-host/#more-57
I’ve been there its VERY cool!!!

We’ve been organising the official 2008 mod meet which is to be held in London this Saturday and Sunday. It’s something we organise every year to thank our Mods for their hard work and to sit down with them to discuss the continual evolution of TSR. We have some fun stuff planned and will definitely post updates on the goings on of the weekend.

Because summer is looming and with it BBQs, my favorite avatar of the week is: becky.fm’s: http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=65940

- J

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Last week I was talking at a conference for higher education marketing people in London. The delegates came along to hear a packed schedule of talks that ranged from universities describing what they were doing to market to students online, to other sites such as Bebo promoting their wares.

I was there to talk about how universities shouldn’t fear user generated content websites, places like TSR, blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook. Websites where students can write anything about anyone (within the rules of the website). I wanted to show then how they too can take advantage of these online tools.

Companies generally have been pretty scared about user generated content, they no longer have the solid grasp of their reputation that they used to, word of mouth can now spread very widely. What existing students say about a university is the top influencing factor prospective students take notice of when making their choices of where to attend.

So I tried to put their mind at ease and show them how they can benefit by reading what is written about them online. How they can modify their practices and generally investigate issues that their students have written about online because most of it is valid stuff. Here’s a example, this TSR user can’t find the info she wants on the Northumbria website:

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?p=12115122

A representative from Northumbria was in the room when I showed this post and she was really interested and said she’d look into it for sure. It’s a simple example but shows that universities can learn and benefit from what is written about them. I know of another university that reviewed and changed their course offer procedure because they read on the student room that it was taking ages for anyone to hear from them.

I used the results from the survey we have been running on the site to show just how balanced most most discussion on TSR and elsewhere on the web tends to be. Of the users that completed the survey 77% said they would respond with their own views if their university was being criticised unfairly online. Similarly only 2% said they’d go out of their way to criticise their university.

Universities are creating profiles in Facebook, they are watching what’s being written about them in blogs and on forum sites but they haven’t quite got to grips with how much they can interact in this world that they feel out of place in. Clearly some uni’s are more tech savvy than others and some unis don’t have to worry at all about this sort of thing because they just get enough applicants whatever.

The future online role of traditional university student ambassadors is interesting, we’ll probably see more and more the same people that show students around in open days creating freshers pages on Facebook and posting answers to questions on TSR. I think this has got to be a good thing for everyone as long as its not done in too much of a promotional way and that its about information provision.

Take a look at the replies to the survey referred to above if you wish:

http://tinyurl.com/63rexm
(the open ended questions are not visible for privacy reasons)

- J

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