Posted by Brad, CEO
It’s hard to believe it’s been over 15 months since we initially pulled data on Social Web Callouts across 1,387 college and university websites in the USA. Just as a quick recap, here’s what the research consists of. We look at the .edu homepage, the Admissions undergraduate homepage and the Alumni homepage for the 1,387 schools (4,161 total URLs) each quarterly and manually pull the data on which pages have SWC’s, and what those SWC’s are.
Our 15-month review has continued to show some interesting trends in higher ed promotion of social web presences via the official website. Here is a quick recap, or feel free to skip down to the slidedeck below!
For the first time ever, more than 50% of all three areas include SWC’s on their site. Alumni leads the way with 60.4% of Alumni homepages including SWC’s on their site.
85.7% of schools (1,188) now have a SWC on one of the three pages we review. This is up from 20.5% (285) in March 2009. (We crossed into the majority around November 2009. Our research in August 2009 (562) found 40.5% of schools, and then 63.2% (877) in ?December 2009.)
More and more schools are including SWC’s on all three pages, which was not the case initially. In March 2009, only .07% of schools (10!) had SWC’s on the .edu homepage, the Admissions homepage and the Alumni Homepage. This suggests an increased web effort across platforms, but also the potential of an integrated presence/strategy between departments. Initially, we’d see 1 department of the three doing the web well. For example, Admissions would be using the social web heavily but Alumni wouldn’t be doing anything, or vice versa. We’re now seeing schools using these tools throughout the entire institution.
Admissions continues to lag behind in promoting their presences via SWC’s directly on their site. Our supplementary research with prospective students has shown that they are more likely to visit and join presences that are officially promoted by the institution.
Of the 769 institutions with SWC’s on their homepage, Facebook appears 96.1% of the time.
The presence of SWC’s has largely been fueled by standard template headers and footers across .edu sites. This typically means the entire site is linking to one presence, which is detrimental to each individual area’s efforts. For example, in March 2009 there wasn’t a single undergrad admissions site with a LinkedIn callout. Now, 62 schools do and LinkedIn appears over 8% of the time on the 735 admission homepages. This is due to LinkedIn being added to the global navigation, not because it’s becoming an effective or utilized tool for Admissions. Subsequently, we continue to see a lazy approach of deploying SWC’s across the site, which means the Facebook logo on an Admissions header/footer links to a Facebook Alumni Page, not the school’s Facebook Admissions Page. Targeted SWC’s are key to promotion.
Facebook is at it again. Literally overnight, Facebook Pages in Higher Ed have seen unprecedented growth out of nowhere. It started with a call from Scott Kilmer at Abilene Christian University, who noted that his page had grown from 12,500 likes to over 30,000 overnight. Joe from BlueFuego took a deeper glimpse into his research, the most comprehensive in the industry, showed that is not an isolated situation.
Last week I presented with Diane McDonald from Texas A&M about last year’s Race to 100K with LSU, and we talked about a potential Race to 200K.
Well, so much for that. Texas A&M isn’t even in the Top 5 anymore. Sadly, schools that have done much of nothing with their Facebook presence are now benefiting from what first appeared to be a glitch, but is looking less like that as the hours go on.
Here’s the previous Top 10 (as of 6/1) and the percentage they jumped overnight:
There’s not much rhyme or reason. TAMU grew 2.3%. The Ohio State University grew 250%. LSU saw a nice bump as well.
It’s easy for “experts” to look at a list of the largest pages and proclaim them as the best pages, but we know that Fans/Likes is only one metric of many to use when determining who’s truly doing it well. We’ll be releasing more about this through the summer.
Take a look below at the research and leave a comment with your thoughts on where Facebook has merged these Fans/Likes from, if they opted in, etc. We will later report how this will affect engagement with the BlueFuego Formula.
I once heard someone say “There are only two reasons that people go online. To get information, and to be entertained.” That might have been the case in the earlier days of the Internet, but in recent years I believe a third has joined these two: connect with others.
When you’re thinking about that new project this summer, new video, new site, new Facebook Page, whatever it is…. reach the trifecta.
Give Information
Entertain
Allow Connections/Conversation
When you think about what you’re currently doing, which of these do you hit? (Or is it like the old adage “Cheap, Good and Fast… choose two”?). When you create something that accomplishes all three, the trifecta, watch what happens. It’s not easy, but it’s worth the extra effort. Doing great things always takes more work.
Want to know how to consistently engage well online? Want to know how you should respond to comments, craft great e-mails, know great, valuable and relevant content to post, etc.? The solution isn’t as hard as you imagine. In fact I can fit it into three words (technically, two): face to face.
What do I mean by face to face? Imagine every scenario as if you’re standing with whoever you’re talking to face to face. How would you talk to them? What would you share with them? What would your tone be? What would you try to express? Getting into that mindset helps us understand how to write to our audience. I think sometimes we get caught up in the thought that we’re communicating with technologies instead of people. Well, I’ll just break that myth right now – we’re talking with people not computers.I think Robert W. Bly, a great copywriter puts it well here:
“The Internet has not changed human nature, nor does people’s buying psychology change simply because they are reading your message online instead of offline.”
I agree and disagree with what he said. The message definitely needs to match the medium (as the social web has shifted the way we communicate), but his argument stands where he contends that at the end of the day, we’re talking with people and human are still humans whether “they read your message online instead of offline.”
The way we would treat people face to face while representing our institution must translate into what we do on the web. When taking time to empathize, understand who we’re talking with, and remembering that we’re talking with people, we will be able to provide better value and authenticity in our communications.
Here are a few examples:
Scenario 1: E-Mail Subject Lines + Body
You’re trying to craft a great e-mail and you want it to really grab attention and provide great information in the body. You consider having a subject line IN ALL CAPS. It grabs attention, looks different and also signifies importance and urgency. The face to face rule translates to a different scenario. I am standing in front of you and I’m shouting, “I HAVE AN IMPORTANT THING TO TELL YOU!” In real life when somebody you don’t know well shouts at you it’s rarely positive. In fact, most strangers that have yelled at me have been one of two things: crazy or having a really bad day.
Now, onto the body. You’re traditionally told that the body of the e-mail has to be really short because nobody wants to pay attention and they just want short spurts of information in one bite. Face to face speaks a bit to the contrary. If somebody is telling you something truly valuable and interesting, would you not pay attention? Would you not want the whole story and seek more information? Also, consider how face to face interaction works. You understand the person and what would be interesting and tangible for them.
Thinking face to face dictates that our e-mail subject line is personal, engaging and draws people in through sparking curiosity. Within the body of the e-mail face to face says that the content depends on who we’re talking with. When a story or conversation provides value, is interesting, or entertaining we pay attention. Being strictly sold to in person usually isn’t acceptable. We need to build relationships first, correct? Then it isn’t appropriate just because it’s an e-mail.
Scenario 2: Responding to Facebook Comments
Somebody post to your Facebook Fan Pages wall, “I just got my acceptance!!! I’m really excited to come here this fall!!!” Many administrators of fan pages don’t respond. From the face to face perspective, that’s like somebody coming into your office, exclaiming their excitement, and being ignored. That isn’t acceptable.
What about questions that come in? If somebody asked you about clubs on your campus, would you point them to a brochure or would you acknowledge them, talk to them, and provide them some resources to turn to?
Scenario 3: Negative Feedback
Imagine how you would respond if somebody was fuming and angry in your office. How would you respond? Likely you would be authentic, acknowledge the situation, and do what you could to make it better. The same applies for online communication.
Face to face will not always guarantee success, but I think it puts us in the best mindset possible when engaging online. What are your thoughts and experiences? Do you agree?
Well, Facebook is at it again. Their latest change (as usual) has ruffled some feathers, most notably page administrators in higher education. Facebook previously allowed Pages to open to a specific tab if you weren’t a Fan (or hadn’t ‘Liked’ it) already. Once you Liked the page, you then landed on the Wall. This allowed institutions to create custom landing tabs, which we’ve previously used with clients to successfully promote events and deadlines, as well as custom FBML tabs that embed content and request information forms.
But that’s changed. Now, unless you have 10,000 Likes or work with an ad representative at Facebook (a.k.a. spend the big bucks), you’ve lost that option. Joe at BlueFuego tapped into the most comprehensive Facebook Pages research in higher ed to see who will be affected by this change. He took out the 500 largest pages of our research sample and put together this nice visual to show you who’s losing their custom landing tab, and what they’ll be missing out on now.
Note: We’re not giving up on Pages in lieu of applications or other features yet. The value (and cost!) of Pages compared to other options still wins, in our opinion.
What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment below!
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