Most college campuses don’t have one staff member toiling away on the social web, answering students’ burning questions and updating the school’s Facebook page. Some institutions have an entire team – seven people, sometimes more, managing the daily Facebook goings-on.
It depends on the size of a university and its commitment to consistent communication with prospective and current students and web-savvy alums, but social media staff varies widely from campus to campus, according to research released Nov. 16 by Varsity Outreach, a company that advises schools with web-based promotion.
Three in 10 colleges have one employee to manage the school’s Facebook presence, according to the Varsity Outreach study, while a few schools – 4 percent of respondents – have seven or more staff members managing and updating social media sites.
Most colleges – 51 percent – have a social media team of two or three people. One in 10 schools has four to six employees managing social sites like Facebook.
The results are similar to last year’s Varsity Outreach survey, and in some cases, identical.
Researchers said some colleges’ lack of attention to Facebook as a primary means of communication was disconcerting as higher education adopts the social website to evaluate prospective students, transmit security and weather warnings, and alert students to upcoming campus events or schedule changes.
Six in 10 colleges who responded to the survey said the school spent 1-4 hours every week on social media initiatives, while one in 10 said they spent less than an hour managing official Facebook pages.
“We worry that schools spending less than one hour per week risk presenting their school in a less-than-ideal light,” the report said. “Social media is not very social if students post questions on the wall of a school’s Facebook Page and do not receive a response for a week or more.”
Three percent of campuses spent more than 10 hours per week updating social media sites.
Varsity Outreach researchers said that among the 600 colleges and universities surveyed, the “most engaging” college Facebook pages post items every two to three days.
Robin Bradford Smail, known as a disruptive technologist at Penn State University, said during an Oct. 12 EDUCAUSE session that campus technology officials have to find and maintain a balance between being passive on Facebook and bombarding students with constant posts.
A campus is considered passive, Bradford Smail said, when the staff in charge of social media initiatives are monitoring their profiles 80 percent of the time and measuring their results—clicks and “likes”—during the remaining time.
Colleges are considered responsive when they limit Facebook monitoring to 60 percent, spending 20 percent of their time responding to student requests and comments and 20 percent measuring results.
“You have to let them know that you’re interested in what they have to say,” Bradford Smail said. “Social media … sort of sputters out if you don’t give it enough information and dedicate enough time to it.”
Any more than 15 Facebook posts a week, she said, “and you’re just talking to yourself.”
AJ Kelton, director of Emerging Instructional Technology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, said campus technology staff would quickly find out that a robust social media presence is rarely measured in dollars spent on online undertakings.
“The biggest cost is the time it takes to do it properly,” Kelton said, adding that it could take weeks or months to learn student patterns of posting and commenting to Twitter and Facebook. “You have to learn the culture … and that’s hard to teach.”
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