“Foursquare provides a means where a user playing the game can stumble upon relevant information that your school provides,” Olsen wrote. “It’s at this juncture of game and information discovery that foursquare shines for me.”
Olsen added: “Facebook Places hasn’t been around as long as foursquare, so foursquare could and probably does have a natural lead.” WVU is also among a group of colleges and universities that work with foursquare to promote use of the mobile service on campus.
While foursquare usage dominated all other geosocial sites at WVU, Facebook Places won out at the school’s sporting venues.
At the campus’s Coliseum, for example, about 3,000 students checked in using Facebook Places–more than double the total number of foursquare users there. The two services received almost identical traffic at Mountaineer Field.
Tricia Petty, a university relations employee at WVU, suggested in the Mobile In Higher Ed blog that Facebook Places is popular at sporting events because Facebook offers “giveaways and promotions” to students who register their location during games.
There were 14,491 foursquare check-ins during the spring semester, and 6,757 Facebook Places check-ins at WVU, according to Olsen’s research.
WVU officials saw student foursquare use steadily rise from December through the end of May. On Dec. 6, the school had a total of 13,216 check-ins; on May 24, that number had grown to 33, 425.
Olsen wrote that after spring break, the university was averaging about 190 check-ins every day.
Closely tracking geosocial data across the WVU campus, Olsen wrote, would prove critical to using the mobile programs to communicate with students online.
“This next year is where we see if we can really leverage the service,” he wrote.
Geosocial networking is also being used in higher education for specific student groups.
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