Socialise your Enquiries
Sometimes, when we call a college up to discuss our solution with them, the conversation goes like:
us: We offer an social enquiry platform for colleges
college: An enquiry platform? We have one of those. We call it email.
BOOM - we hit them with the benefits of our platform, they sign up, love us and we all live like The Waltons for ever after.
Seriously, what we are really selling them on is the benefit of 'Socialising their Enquiries'. You see, most colleges that we talk to still use email to respond to inbound questions. The problem with email is that it is usually 1-1 communication channel (course co-ordinator answers question for 1 student). In some circumstances, this is fine (question deals with a potentially sensitive issue, the question is highly specific, etc.) but for most questions, other people could also benefit from the response.
The difference with our platform is that when a prospective student asks a question, the question gets posted to the course page and if they want to, back to their Facebook wall / Twitter stream. When the question is answered, the answer gets posted also. This makes the course page richer and richer over time.
That is the real difference between email enquiries and social enquiries. Believe me, its time to get busy socialising your enquiries!