Facebook introduces new feature to attract students – Facebook Campus

Facebook is trying to win back the millennials in the colleges and universities by introducing a new feature called Facebook Campus. It is a college-only space designed to help students connect with fellow classmates over shared interests.

Facebook Campus is a dedicated section of the Facebook app designed for students, with a Campus profile that’s different from their main Facebook profile.

To create a Campus profile, all students need is their college email and graduation year. Other information such as their major, classes, hometown and minor are optional. Once a Campus profile is set up, students can discover Groups and Events unique to their school, and connect with classmates who share similar interests. When content is shared on Campus, only people within Campus will see it. 

Key Features

• Campus-only News Feed: Campus is a college email-verified space designed for students to get updates from classmates, groups and events in a college-specific feed. Students can create study groups, plan virtual concerts or ask for advice with college-only Groups and Events.
• Campus directory: College is about finding your people, so we created a classmates directory to make it easy to find and meet new people. Like in the early days when Facebook was a college-only network, students can find classmates by class, major, year and more.
• New ways to chat: Campus Chats are real-time chat rooms. Students can create chat rooms for their dorm, clubs or any other groups they’re part of within Campus.

Facebook has started the rollout of this feature across colleges in the United States. The colleges are Benedict College; Brown University; California Institute of Technology; College of William & Mary; Duke University; Florida International University; Georgia Southern University; Georgia State University; Johns Hopkins University; Lane College; Lincoln University (Pennsylvania); Middlebury College; New Jersey Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Rice University; Sarah Lawrence College; Scripps College; Smith College; Spelman College; Stephen F Austin State University; Tufts University; University at Albany – State University of New York; University of Hartford; University of Louisville; University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; Vassar College; Virginia Tech; Wellesley College; and Wesleyan University. Students at these colleges can find Campus within the Facebook app. 

A cursory glance at the list of colleges reveals that the list does not include Ivy League Schools. Facebook says that these first Facebook Campus schools were selected for diversity’s sake. That is, diversity of the student population, diversity of geography and diversity of school specialties (like liberal arts). They also represent a mix of public and private schools.

Would this feature help Facebook to get back students that it has seemingly lost to other social media platforms like snapchat or instagram? A 2019 survey by Edison Research indicated that Facebook had lost 15 million users since 2017, with the biggest drop coming from the 12 to 34-year-old group.

Remember Facebook started out initially as a Harvard-only student platform, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard University roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes