Facebook Comments – Monthly review of Swedish University Facebook Pages

Who has had the most posts from their friends this month? Yes, I know Facebook launched their ‘are talking about’ metric last week which, on the face of it (ha, see what I did there), would make this comparison somewhat redundant. But, you know, it does not seem to look like that. I still think a new comment left on your wall is pretty much a slice of fried gold – it’s the one of the ultimate metrics; particularly if the purpose of your page is talking to people. Absolutely they could be commenting on stuff you’ve posted but that’s still not quite the same, or as powerful sign of engagement,  as an unsolicited, original comment – particularly one which is related to the mission of your page.

Without being able to access the back end of the Facebook insights, it’s hard to know what’s influencing the ‘are talking about’ metric on any given day – it could be  any combination of likes, comments or sharing of content. A page with a closed wall can still have a high ‘are talking about’ score, but I would argue that those pages are probably doing less for the organisation than a wall which allows, and cultivates, commenting (and if anyone knows how to make a call for the ‘Are talking about’ metric from the Facebook API I’d love to hear from you!).

Overall, this month every page dropped in the amount of activity – there was a lot of posting going on in August, presumably due to the start of the new term. Malmö and Lund continue to lead the pack for English language pages while Skövde sits at the top of the Swedish pages.

Swedish Universities English Facebook Pages – Ranked by number of comments left in September.
(If you compare this to last month, then remember that I collected data from over 3 months in the summer; rather than looking at a single month)

Page	Comments left by page friends
Malmö University	77
Lund University	68
Uppsala University	15
Jönköping University	12
Mid Sweden Uni	4
Stockholm University	Wall closed
Chalmers School of Technology	Wall closed
Stockholm School of Economics	Wall closed
Umeå University	Wall closed

There’s a +/- of around 5 going on here; and there’s a number of posts left by friends, which get included, that come pretty close to the spam category (not many though). There are not so many posts from other pages, which is interesting when you consider that most of these universities have a rich ecosystem of pages – cross posting between them would probably be beneficial for the page friends. Malmö University’s comment count was boosted by the posting of photographs, by friends of the page.

Swedish Universities Swedish Facebook Pages – Ranked by number of comments left in September.

Page	Comments left by page friends
Högskolan i Skövde	74
Linne Universitet	55
Högskolan i Borås	45
Linköping Universitet	45
Lunds Universitet	31
Mälardalans Högskola	28
Umeå universitet	26
Uppsala universitet	21
Malmö Högskola	21
KTH	19
Mittuniversitetet	19
Högskolan Väst	13
University of Borås	10
Karlstads Universitet	8
SLU	8
Högskolan i Halmstad	7
Högskolan Dalarna	7
Högskolan Kristianstad	5
BTH officiell	2
Karolinska Institutet	Posts not allowed
Royal Institute of Art	Posts not allowed
Stockholms Universitet	Posts not allowed

Mashup Pages
An awful lot of people come to your website, every day. And a lot of them don’t look at your homepage, or are there a very short space of time. If you’re relying on your homepage to draw visitors to your social media assets then you may be missing a trick. One solution is the use of mashups which provide an overview of all the social media assets from the university. Here’s some examples from some Swedish websites:

Linneuniversitet:

Borås University:

Borås include a feed from Twitter which shows tweets where the university is mentioned, which is very transparent.

And an example from the US: William and Mary Mashup

Normally I react against the ‘official’ label, but in this example I like the ‘Official’ and ‘Official-ish’ distinction!

Advertisement

Tags: facebook, media, medier, sidor, social, sociala, student, students, sverige, swedish, universities, university, web