Duke University Takes to Sina Weibo to Connect with Potential Students

We’ve written much in the past about how individuals and organizations outside of China are making use of Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Weibo microblogging platform in order to reach Chinese speaking netizens. Whether it’s famous celebrities (see Tom Cruise, Emma Watson, Brad Pitt) or politicians (from Australia, England, Japan) or brands — Weibo appears to be the medium of choice.

College recruiting appears to be the latest use for Weibo, as Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering recently held a group chat on its Sina Weibo page in order to answer questions from prospective students for its graduate program.

In total, there were 150 participants, with 80 questions posted in the short span of an hour. Graduates and current students in the program were also available to answer questions. You can get an idea of the type of inquiries that were asked here.

Duke is also active on Renren as well, giving it a pretty progressive Chinese social media strategy.

While it’s no surprise that more and more schools are enlisting the help of social media tools in recruiting these days, it’s interesting to see U.S. schools go so far as to join Chinese platforms to recruit Chinese students. I wonder how active most Chinese universities are in comparison, assuming they are active at all?

On a somewhat related note, we recently wrote about India’s top business school, IIM-A, which partnered with LinkedIn to help connect students to recruiters.