US News: An Update
Posted by Brad and Joe, Co-Founders of BlueFuego
Here is a follow up to our post earlier this week about sharing your US News ranking via the social web, more specifically Facebook Pages. Here is a quick snapshot of the US News release from yesterday.
After the day, Joe decided to take a look at Top 100 National Universities according to the rankings and cross reference to Facebook Page wall posts.
Of these 100 schools, 37 posted on their wall about the rankings the day they came out. How were the results? An average of .9361% engagement on the updates.
To put that in perspective, if these schools would consistently get at level of engagement on each post, they’d all be in the Top 50 most engaging pages of our data that tracks over 1,400 Pages.
But if you know BlueFuego, you know we couldn’t stop there.
Next, we dove in and look at the Top 100 National Liberal Art Colleges. Here, only 17 of the 100 updated on the wall about their ranking, to the tune of an average 1.0124% engagement.
We have our opinions in why a lower amount of schools in the more prestigious category didn’t update regarding their ranking (eternal embargo from the top? 
). But one thing is for sure…. data doesn’t lie.
Aug 19, 2010
Like most schools, we weren’t going to make a big deal about our ranking, and that included a conscious decision to NOT post it on Facebook. I even confirmed that decision with my boss after seeing many of our followers enthusiastically sharing the link on Twitter (we achieved our highest rank ever). Then I read your post and shared it with my bosses as an argument for posting to Facebook. They agreed and BAM! we got it out right away, and it was a huge success.
Thanks for your well-reasoned, factual arguments. In our case, it really made an impact.
Oct 14, 2010
I’m at one of those small liberal arts colleges, and our ex-president signed an agreement *not* to use any subjective metrics in our marketing… which explicitly excludes U.S. News & World Report.
Interestingly, I believe we’re the only top-10 school to have signed up with that campaign.
I’m not sure how many of the 100 schools have signed the agreement, but it may help explain why fewer of them are pushing the rankings.