Kent State "Fan"fare

The winner of the contest is Emily Englehart, a Kent State post-secondary student from Southeast High School in Akron. Englehart says she was already a fan of Kent State on Facebook, and noticed the contest from a status update by the university.

“I saw the status and thought, I could probably win that,” Englehart says.

Englehart adds that she plans on attending Kent State after graduating from high school this spring. While Englehart has not yet settled on a major, she is looking into programs offered by the Department of Psychology and Department of Physics.

The Kent State Facebook page fan count has experienced an increase of 373.71 percent since April 2, 2009. Although it originally launched in August 2008, one month after the Kent State YouTube page, the launch was not widely publicized to allow time for content to grow and become intriguing to potential Kent State Facebook fans. When the university launched its new Web site this past fall, accessibility to social media pages such as Facebook and YouTube was built into each page of the university’s institutional Web site.

Lin Danes, electronic communication and Web content manager for University Communications and Marketing, said the university Facebook, YouTube and other social media efforts have become standard business practice. The goal is to generate excitement about the university, as well as a sense of community, among future students, current students, alumni, employees and faculty. The 10,000th Kent State Facebook Fan contest did just that — increased engagement with existing fans and generated 1,228 fan sign ups during the contest; 500 during the contest weeks alone.

Become a Kent State Facebook fan like Emily and watch for more contests.