Social Networking and Higher Ed
Feb
19
There has been some recent discussion about social networking and its place in higher education that piqued my curiosity. I’ve been told the general consensus is that UF should maintain a presence on all major social networks to eliminate the risk of someone not affiliated creating an unofficial presence.
But I wanted to know what UF’s Web community thought. So being the good journalist I am, I started e-mailing and asking around to get the skinny on social networking.
One of our student managers, Tim Gratil, provided some good insight in an e-mail:
“I think the presence of higher education on social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter would boost the visibility of a University’s information, making it easier to communicate alerts/announcements/events to its student body, encouraging students to network among each other, etc. As long as it doesn’t spam my inbox with a ton of messages/notifications, I’m all for it.”
Tim’s opinion made me think of UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Science’s Facebook page, which is a really solid example of how higher ed institutions can use social networking.
As of today, the page has 131 Facebook fans (including me). It keeps consistent updates of CLAS’ latest events and news, along with a list of books written by professors within the college.
I sent an e-mail to Jeff Stevens, CLAS’ Webmaster, who is responsible for managing the page, to ask some questions about it and got some really informative answers:
How old is the page?
We launched the page in spring of last year - I think it was mid-April.How quickly did students respond to the page, if at all?
Initial interest in the page was not from students, but from invited faculty and staff who were already active in Facebook. Student interest grew when several popular faculty members and administrators became fans of the page. Student interest increased after we posted a series of invitations to the UF Network page. We’ve continued to gain new fans, but the increase is fairly slow.Has the page had any affect on visitors to the College’s Web site?
We have not seen a decrease in traffic to the college’s home page. There has been some direct traffic from stories on Facebook to the college web site, but these results have been very small.What would you say is the mission of the page?
The primary mission of the page is to be serve as an alternate communications medium on news and events in the college. We are currently discussing how we can expand on its purpose as an outreach and alumni development tool.What have visitors responded to?
Visitors respond most to the events section of the page.How do you measure the page’s success?
We’ve had a triple-fold increase in viewership very recently - in the last three weeks or so - which coincided with a series of updates sent from the page and the promotion of a new lecture that had broad support from several local community organizations. The goal is to increase awareness of the site in the upcoming year and to increase the number of users by 50%. We have anecdotal evidence that the page has encouraged faculty to open Facebook profiles, and that at least one of these faculty members has as a result made contact with a member of a prominent grant-writing board. There is a difficulty in quantifying the building of social bonds, which we have yet to find a way to effectively measure.Would you recommend creating a page to other colleges?
I would recommend other colleges to maintain a page. It is important to maintain contact with students, alumni, and other invested individuals, and it is necessary for communications personnel to engage them in the media they choose to use, rather than driving them to the media you elect to use.How do you find the time to keep the page updated?
LOL. Good question.I’ve made updating it part of my daily routine. I already have a checklist for incoming events and the places where they need to be posted, and I added this as another task to that process. For news articles and announcements, I post the link at the same time I am updating RSS feeds. I could automate the process using an RSS feed for news stories, but doing so only brings in links - I prefer to do it manually as I can add an accompanying photo and a block of text to go with the articles. Overall, I’d say the use of Facebook adds up to about 15-30 minutes on an average day (this, of course, changes depending upon how many events there are to add).
Thanks, Jeff! Very interesting!
This post isn’t all-encompassing, so if anyone wants to share additional info or opinions, go right ahead!
Related links to make you think:
February 19th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
One more question for Jeff… Does the CLAS Facebook page wall open for fans to post comments? If so, have there been any problems with allowing open postings?
February 19th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Currently our wall and our photo sections are closed for fans to add to, but this is an ongoing discussion within our office as to opening up. I tend to think the page would be better trafficked and utilized in an open environment that encourages response from the fans. There is hesitation precisely for the reasons you are alluding to - who will monitor content (or should it be monitored at all), and the extent to which the College would be responsible for user-posted content. One can say it will be moderated, but the current staffing would make real-time monitoring of the page next to impossible.
February 19th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
FYI… No need to post this as a comment, but the hyperlinks for the first two “related links” are missing a “u” in doteduguru.com
Great topic! We need more of these discussions.
February 19th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Fixed the hyperlinks. Thanks for the heads up!
The folks in UF Web Administration are hoping to use the blog and other resources to open up discussion among the UF web community. Thank you for joining the conversation!
February 20th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Great discussion topic.
Given Facebook’s latest TOS debacle, I wonder how far one would want to travel there. There are serious intellectual property issues associated with FB’s terms of services that I think the university ought to carefully consider these before investing too much time and energy into adding content.
There is also the question of mixing business with pleasure. FB is a site many students turn to for personal endeavors. Would students be interested in getting UF messages mixed in with their personal updates and wall posts? Research suggests that FB is really a great escape for many students. That is, they tend to go there to escape their work. So what would happen to UF messages in such a context? Hmmm?
February 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Good points, Christopher. Thanks for adding to the discussion!
The fastest growing demographic in Facebook is above the age of 30. Although your points are certainly valid, we must also consider the fact that an official Facebook presence will not only serve current students but also alums and other non-affiliated but interested people.
The TOS issue also gave me pause. If we were to post our official UF signature on the UF Facebook page, should we assume that Facebook can “own” that signature based on an interpretation of the TOS?
I’m happy to report that Facebook has rescinded this latest change to the TOS, so it’s clear that they listen to the public on matters such as these.
February 23rd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I think it also depends on what kid of content UF wishes to push through Facebook as a ‘channel’. I would not want to spend too much time building custom content for a Facebook page - there is too much pressing work needed for official UF pages. But anywhere we can automate the pushing of public relations content - events, news, unused photos of an event that did not end up in a publication - I think it has value as a communications outlet.
For instance, I received an email about an event in four days from one of our departments that I think could generate a lot of interest for students to attend. If I were looking to use traditional media channels - I don’t have a shot to let people know - there is not enough time to do a proper print-run poster, and an in house flyer on one of our printers won’t get a lot of views (and wouldn’t be Think Before You Ink). Facebook gives me the opportunity to get that message out quickly, and to a place where the audience chooses to visit.
I would agree with Christopher that communicating through Facebook to students wouldn’t work for all colleges. Journalism, however, has nearly 1,000 members already - it’s growth is phenomenal. Communicating through Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network will require a communicator who can speak in a more conversational tone than traditional public relations - especially in collegiate news - has used in the past.
February 27th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
OK, since Jeff called me out, I’ll add a few comments.
First, at the time of this writing, the College of Journalism page has just short of 800 fans, not 1,000 as Jeff states. Still, that’s phenomenal growth considering that I don’t actively manage the page as much as Jeff does for CLAS.
Part of the growth is most likely attributable to the fact that Dean Wright is very active on Facebook. He has over 1,600 friends on there, himself. He uses it, for example, to announce casual meet ups with alumni in his travels.
There was no management decision to pursue this communication channel. I saw that Jeff had created the page for CLAS, thought it was a good idea, and did likewise.
I would like to have everything I post there to have a link back to the college’s web site, but that is not always possible.
Our College News is piped there via the SimplyRSS application. I thought it would be automatic when I set it up, but it appears to require prompting to update. And for a few days this week it was throwing errors.
Our age demographics (as of now) are as follows:
13-17: 1%
18-24: 26%
25-34: 39%
35-44: 24%
45+: 11%
Based on this, I’d say our alumni reach there is much greater than our current student reach.