The Social Side of College Admissions

We've been gathering data for over a year now on college and university Facebook Pages, specifically tracking the likes and comments that all the posts by these pages receive. These efforts help us learn more about what types of content and what topics generate the greatest response from a school's audience on Facebook. As we kick off 2012, we decided to take a look back at data we collected on more than 200,000 posts in 2011.

Throughout this and previous analyses of posts by Facebook pages, we've used a simple measure of engagement:

Engagement Score

Frequency of Posting

We did an initial cut when looking at school-specific data. Our analysis focused on Facebook Pages in our directory that had at least 12 posts (basically 1 post per month) by the page in 2011. We considered this a base-line measure of whether the page was even an active page. This left us with 602 Facebook Pages that we used for our analysis below. If you want a closer look at some of the data, you can access an Excel document with these 602 schools listed along with summary data for each school.

Data on Page Post Frequency

We wanted to know if post frequency translated into engagement. Below are our findings, with schools grouped by their post frequency ranking (along with the average number of posts for 2011 and the average fan base of the Facebook Page in a particular grouping).

Engagement by Post Frequency

Please Note: For this chart, the average engagement score is represented by the green bars and the average number of posts for a group is represented by the blue line.

Interestingly, there seemed to be an inverse relationship between frequency and engagement. To be fair, some of the drop-off in engagement may also have to do with fan counts. As you can see, pages with large fan bases tended to post more frequently.

What to Post – A Look at Engagement by Media Type

We then took a look at what types of posts do best. The data is pretty consistent with what we've found in previous studies. Photos generate the most engagement (as measured by likes and comments). It's our hypothesis that photos are more likely to grab a user's attention when viewing the News Feed and are easy to consume (no reading required, just looking at a picture). Conversely, links drive you off the Facebook site and require you to return to the page to comment on or like the post. This isn't inherently a bad thing (obviously generating a new visitor for your site is a plus), but it does likely translate into fewer comments and likes per post.

The Most Engaging Posts – A Look at the Top 500 Posts of 2011

We decided to do a deeper dive into the top 500 posts of 2011, categorizing them based on what the post was about. We grouped each of these posts into one of 9 categories. Each post was given only one category. We made a judgment call if a post fit into more than one about which aspect of the post seemed to be driving more of the likes and comments (e.g., a post announcing a school winning an athletic championship with a photo of the winning team would have been categorized as a Score / Result / Pre-Game rather than a Photo). If you want to see our categorizations or do your own analysis, we've shared our Excel document for anyone to download.

Score / Result / Pre-Game—Relating to a school's athletic teams, whether it was a score, an upcoming game, or a big win over a rival
Announcements / News / Shout-Outs—Announcing upcoming events, achievements by faculty or alumni, important dates, or general news about the university
Contest—Offering a prize if fans like or post a comment
Photo—Typically a photo of campus, an event, or alumni
Question—Posing an open-ended question or a prompt ("Tell us your favorite...")
Weather / Closure—Alerting students to important weather updates or to the school's status as open or closed due to inclement weather
Stat / Fact / Ranking—Highlighting a school's inclusion in a ranking list (e.g., US News) or a fun fact about the school
Video—Incorporating a video attachment
Miscellaneous—Catch-all for posts that did not neatly fit into one of the other categories

Breakdown of Top 500 Posts by Content Category

Clearly, school affinity is closely tied with sports fandom at many schools. More than a quarter of the 500 most-engaging posts related to a school's sports teams. Examples included posts leading up to a rivalry game or highlighting a win over a nationally-ranked opponent.

Not surprisingly, contests accounted for 16 percent of the top 500. A good way to motivate your fans to post and like is to offer them the chance to win something if they do. We all like winning free stuff, right? In fact, nearly a third of the top 50 posts were contests. And, in most cases, these prizes did not have hefty cash values. The prospect of winning a t-shirt or a video game was often enough to rev up a fan base.

When we looked at the media type of these 500 posts, we noticed again that photos definitely help generate engagement. Nearly a third of these posts included a photo.

Breakdown of Top 500 Posts by Media Type

The Most Engaging College & University Facebook Pages of 2011

Here are the top 10 most engaging college and university Facebook pages for 2011 by size category. We've broken them up into size categories so the comparison is more of an apples-to-apples one.

XX Large (75,000+ Facebook fans)

Rank	School		Engagement Score
1		Texas A&M University (College Station, TX)	4.457 332 posts
2		The University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS)	3.685 214 posts
3		University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, WI)	3.624 252 posts
4		Auburn University (Auburn, AL)	3.281 213 posts
5		Clemson University (Clemson, SC)	2.779 321 posts
6		Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)	2.591 226 posts
7		Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)	2.499 182 posts
8		University of Phoenix (Phoenix, AZ)	2.381 692 posts
9		UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)	2.289 291 posts
10		Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR)	2.182 119 posts

X Large (20,000-74,999 Facebook fans)

Rank	School		Engagement Score
1		University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Lincoln, NE)	5.268 306 posts
2		University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA)	4.633 630 posts
3		North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC)	4.422 154 posts
4		Johnson and Wales University (Multiple Locations)	4.185 16 posts
5		Southern Illinois University Carbondale (Carbondale, IL)	3.670 318 posts
6		California State University, Northridge (Northridge, CA)	3.548 208 posts
7		SMU (Dallas, TX)	3.330 258 posts
8		Georgia Southern University (Statesboro, GA)	3.255 375 posts
9		Walden University (Online)	3.200 372 posts
10		Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA)	3.076 367 posts

Large (7,500-19,999 Facebook fans)

Rank	School		Engagement Score
1		Siena College (Loudonville, NY)	8.599 78 posts
2		Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA)	6.599 255 posts
3		University of St. Thomas (Saint Paul, MN)	6.314 354 posts
4		The University of Montana (Missoula, MT)	5.584 53 posts
5		Ross University (Multiple Locations)	5.418 93 posts
6		Brigham Young University - Alumni (Provo, UT)	4.906 301 posts
7		Smith College (Northampton, MA)	4.630 493 posts
8		UT Arlington (Arlington, TX)	4.508 76 posts
9		St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN)	4.388 160 posts
10		University of Nevada, Reno (Reno, NV)	4.316 199 posts

Medium (2,500-7,499 Facebook fans)

Rank	School		Engagement Score
1		Merrimack College (North Andover, MA)	10.926 84 posts
2		Shaw University (Raleigh, NC)	7.983 97 posts
3		Buena Vista University (Storm Lake, IA)	7.982 124 posts
4		California Lutheran University (Thousand Oaks, CA)	6.966 25 posts
5		Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA)	6.689 163 posts
6		Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo, MI)	6.684 165 posts
7		The Citadel Alumni Association (Charleston, SC)	6.441 159 posts
8		Susquehanna University (Selinsgrove, PA)	6.346 146 posts
9		University of the South (Sewanee, TN)	6.201 257 posts
10		Taylor University (Upland, IN)	5.911 95 posts

Small (Fewer than 2,500 Facebook fans)

Rank	School		Engagement Score
1		Indiana University Kokomo Admissions Office (Kokomo, IN)	14.872 41 posts
2		VCU School of Business (Richmond, VA)	13.875 106 posts
3		University of Minnesota Rochester (Rochester, MN)	9.461 151 posts
4		Holyoke Community College (Holyoke, MA)	8.512 430 posts
5		Neumont University (South Jordan, UT)	8.394 180 posts
6		Dallas County Community College District (Dallas, TX)	7.957 188 posts
7		Saint Joseph's College (Rensselaer, IN)	6.767 35 posts
8		Hesston College (Hesston, KS)	6.683 26 posts
9		California State University, Chico (Chico, CA)	5.914 156 posts
10		Waynesburg University (Waynesburg, PA)	5.802 23 posts

Research Note: While we have made efforts to include a wide range of schools, we do admit that our directory is not an exhaustive list of college and university Facebook Pages. If your college or university is not in our directory and you'd like it to be included, simply contact us and provide a link to your official Facebook page. We're happy to add you to the directory and include your school in future studies.

Please Note: If you take a closer look at the top 500 posts as well as the most engaging pages, you may notice that not all of the engagement was positive. A few posts and a couple pages made these lists because they ended up serving as lightning rods for criticism of the school.

Labels: Admissions, data, Facebook, Metrics, Rankings, Strategy