Posted by Joe and Brad, Co-Founders of BlueFuego
We see it all the time in higher education, more specifically on Facebook Pages. A confusion of interests between 1) what the page administrator cares about or likes, and 2) what the audience cares about or likes. And as a result, both suffer.
You’ve probably heard us say it at a conference before: You are what you publish, and your institution is what you publish. You might think that your audience cares about your favorite TV show, an event in the area that you are passionate about, etc., but the majority of the time, the post falls on deaf ears.
Take for example the recent mini-meme within the higher ed web developer world of the venn diagram on XKCD. Through our monthly research of nearly 1,400 universities and colleges on Facebook, we saw several schools post this cartoon to their Facebook Page.
Average Engagement on the XKCD post = 0.025%.
Average Engagement on all other posts for the month = .1734%
Yes, a fourth of a percent of the audience responded with a comment or like, well below the average. In most cases, it fell on deaf ears, with no engagement at all. There’s a 594% difference in engagement between the XKCD post and the rest of the posts for the month.
US News Rankings
Let’s talk for a moment about US News Rankings, which were released today. A common sentiment between higher ed employees is that the rankings are flawed, irrelevant, and aren’t even worth a mention on the site or web presence. Heck, Brad’s even said it before. But… is it your interest, or the audience?
Now, take a look at this data of an event similar to the US News Rankings being released today. The Forbes 100, which were released earlier this month. Of the 100 schools on the list, 10 decided to update their Facebook community with the news of their ranking. How did it go with the community (the audience you should be serving)?
Principia College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .412%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .987%
Forbes Post Engagement: 4.064%
Washington & Jefferson:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .312%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .594%
Forbes Post Engagement: 2.541%
Wofford College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .184%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .087%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.996%
Westmont College:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .121%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .225%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.535%
Centre College (KY):
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .363%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .038%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.499%
Claremont McKenna:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .070%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .044%
Forbes Post Engagement: 1.214%
Drew University:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .114%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .324%
Forbes Post Engagement: .973%
Tufts University:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .154%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .117%
Forbes Post Engagement: .715%
University of Virginia:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .147%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .108%
Forbes Post Engagement: .426%
William & Mary:
2010 YTD Facebook Engagement: .109%
August MTD Facebook Engagement: .065%
Forbes Post Engagement: .204%
Wow. That’s some serious engagement. (We based engagement on the BlueFuego Formula.)
Final Thoughts
This is something that has been on our minds for quite awhile, as we continue to watch endless amounts of universities and colleges miss the mark with their updates.
Who is running your page? Are they even an effective communicator? Marketer? Or did they just happen to get there first? If you haven’t considered the fact that your Facebook Page/Presence is where most of your audience is having more touch points with your brand than ever before, and you haven’t yet thought about who’s running the Page and if they are truly a match to be communicating your messages and representing you, then it might be time to re-visit how you’re doing things. All it takes is one off-message post for someone to click hide and never hear from you again. The short-term agony of restructuring who’s involved has long-term implications for your brand and your institution.
While we are not advocating a restructuring that includes red-tape about who posts, what they post, getting approval, etc… we are advocating having the right person in place, people who understand the audience, to be representing you online.
Got a good ranking today? Post it to your online communities. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.
Posts about rankings and other points of pride typically score highest on our campus Facebook page. One interesting thing I noticed about the level of activity on our campus Facebook page today, after posting our U.S. News ranking, is that most of the engagement (likes) came from international students. This underscores an assumption I’ve heard bandied about in higher ed circles — that international audiences may take U.S. News and other rankings more seriously than U.S. audiences.
Whether we like the rankings or not, using third-party sources to validate the worth of any enterprise is a time-honored PR approach. Testimonials, after all, are essentially third-party validation.
P.S. – We got a bigger bang, so to speak, from Popular Science’s recent ranking of our explosives engineering program as the nation’s top awesome college lab.
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