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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