According to Jeff Berg, Social Media Strategist, 87% of students trust their friends’ recommendations over critics and are three times more likely to trust peer recommendations over advertising.

This puts prevalence on online community marketing as a powerful tool for student recruiting. And according to Adam Singer at TopRankBlog.com, “community is what makes sites worth visiting.”

To understand the concept of an online community, it is defined as a group of people with similar goals and interests who connect and exchange information on the web.

If this sounds similar to a community in the traditional sense – in the real world – that’s because the online community is simply a natural extension of it. Forrester reports that to be effective, your online community needs members; strength in numbers is another parallel concept between the online and real worlds.

But with so many online communities out there, what makes some thrive and others turn into a virtual ghost town?

While content is always an important aspect of any website, when it comes to the online community, “control is in the hands of the members”, as stated by Forrester.

The Hyper-Social Summit sponsored by the Human 1.0 Network focused on the need to look at the human issues in online communities, stating that, “reciprocity is one key issue and a basic human reflex. If you act without reciprocity it can hurt the community so humans have developed a sense of fairness. There has been a lot of research to support this. Fairness is even more important than transparency.”

Building a vibrant online community should also mimic the positive interactions traditionally formed within the student body and faculty departments.

According to Katy Keim, CMO of California-based Lithium, there are three factors for gauging the future success of your online community: liveliness, responsiveness and interaction.

What it comes down to is that people like to go where the action is and maintaining momentum of your online community’s growth depends on interesting content and ensuring that your members have an easy way to participate.

It is important that the members of your online community feel involved as this is an important contributor to the success of a online community marketing program. So while social media has changed the way that we communicate, the foundation of “how” we communicate remains the same: listen, engage, build trust.

As your online community thrives with ongoing conversations between students and faculty, recruitment becomes an authentic result.