X
Innovation

10 universities that have mastered social media

Which schools across the U.S. are using Twitter and Facebook the best?
Written by Sarah Korones, Contributor

Facebook and Twitter aren’t just for the college student anymore.

University administrators have been quick to join their students online, recognizing social media’s importance in establishing a school’s brand and allowing faculty to connect with students, both current and prospective. In fact, in one recent study, researchers found that 100 percent of universities surveyed used social media as a way to reach out to students.

So which schools are actually connecting with their students and which ones simply create a Facebook page and call it a day? In a new online ranking from Unigo, an online resource for college information of all kind, analysts rated the ten schools in the U.S. that most effectively employ social media.

To make its list, Unigo studied the top 100 national and liberal arts colleges in the U.S., looking at metrics such as the school’s number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, the average number of posts or tweets the school produced per month, and the engagement of other users with those posts.

Here are the colleges that use social media the best, according to Unigo:

  1. Pennsylvania State University
  2. Yale University
  3. Harvard University
  4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  5. University of Southern California
  6. University of Texas at Austin
  7. Stanford University
  8. University of Wisconsin-Madison
  9. University of California Berkeley
  10. University of Washington-Seattle

One of the most important measures for social media success on the campus is conversation: Are users taking the time to retweet a message from a university account? Are they commenting on the school’s Facebook posts? In this regard, MIT definitely seems to know how to captivate its followers. The university averages 29 comments per Facebook post, receives four retweets for every tweet, and is mentioned on Twitter approximately three times every minute.

[via Mashable]

Image: Allie Caulfield/Flickr

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

Editorial standards