Swedish University Facebook Pages – Monthly Review – Part I: Friends

Here’s the first of two posts covering the activity of Swedish higher education Facebook pages – these data are for the summer, and bring us more or less up to date. This post is just the friend data, I still need to take a look at comments – that will come later. I’m also asking for help concerning the age of Facebook pages, see my earlier post about it here (particularly if you are a page owner at a Swedish university).

The average increase in the number of friends over the summer (I compared the number of friends in August, with the number from May), for the University Facebook pages listed below was 13%.

Lund University’s English page moved past Linköping’s Swedish page into the number 1 spot, but otherwise the top 5 universities remained unchanged.  Of these top 5, only Lund and Umeå showed any significant growth above the average.

Lower down the list, Skövde is the biggest climber with a whopping 40% increase in friends in the last few months; impressive stuff. KTH, Uppsala University, Karolinska Institute and Malmö University also had above average gains in the number of friends.

University Page	Number of Friends August 5th 2011	% Increase compared to May 24th 2011
Lund University	7695	18
Linköping Universitet	7444	7
Umeå universitet	5555	15
Linne Universitet	5078	7
Stockholm University	4651	11
Umeå University	4260	7
Uppsala universitet	3404	9
Jönköping University	3055	7
Högskolan i Borås	3048	6
Lunds Universitet	2844	12
SLU	2706	4
Skovde	2573	41
Chalmers University of technology	2561	12
Stockholm school of economics	2209	5
Karolinska Institutet	2099	24
Högskolan Väst	1811	10
Högskolan i Halmstad	1788	9
Mälardalans Högskola	1735	16
KTH	1643	30
Stockholm’s universitet	1458	16
Malmö University	1399	28
Malmö Högskola	1177	12
Karlstads Universitet	1093	13
Uppsala University	1041	31
Royal Institute of Art	1020	8
Högskolan Dalarna	592	9
BTH officiell	541	6
Högskolan Kristianstad	362	13

There’s a bunch of pages which experienced rather sluggish growth over the summer. What’s the difference between these pages, and those showing more aggressive growth? It does not seem to be as simple as brand, as there are both well established and new universities distributed throughout the list.  Maybe those pages where there is a concerted effort to engage are those which exhibit growth? Incidently,  5 pages have closed walls, three of which show little growth.

In my next post I’ll be looking at the amount of comments on these pages; this will shed a little more light on the summer’s activity.

Cookie Killer Law – EU Commissioner Smack Down: Things just got more confusing…

Confusing and bad news for website owners – EU Data Supervisor says that industry guidelines for cookie use are not sufficient and that consent for cookie use must be actively obtained – criticizing the softer stance of EU Commissioner. 

Rather than have the usual picture of biscuits, jars or muppets to go with this cookie post I thought I'd channel some Johnny Cash instead. Image: Flickr - Diogo A Figueira.

This is another of my posts about the EU directive which threatens life as we know it. This is an amendment to the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive which forces website owners to obtain consent from a website visitor before cookies can be left on their computer. The upshot of this would be a sudden, and profound, hole in the data we collect on customer behavior on our websites.

No one really knows what the hell to do – since the Directive’s amendment, confusion has reigned supreme with some EU countries not getting round to implementing it while others, like the UK, bashing out a rapid response – and then giving organisations a year to respond to it.

Websites which have attempted to get visitor consent have screwed their site, and their data collection, with unwieldy solutions – the UK Information Commission’s Office, I’m looking at you.

Right now, there has not been any major indications that cookie use is being reduced.

In the background, marketing and advertising associations have been putting together guidelines for how cookie users can respond to this – use cookies, and yet still remain within the law. Check out the guidelines from the Swedish brand of the IAB here.

EU Data Protection Supervisor criticizes EU Commissioner – Advertising Association guidelines unworkable?

Neelie Kroes, the EU Commissioner behind this directive, had previously said that European companies have a year to comply with the directive and that she supported efforts by advertising associations (such as the IAB) to create some kind of standardized opt-in.

Not good enough, responded Peter Hustinex the European Data Protection Supervisor. In a recent speech he specifically said that the guidelines suggested by the IAB fell short of the requirements of the directive, despite them being welcomed by Kroes, the EU Commissioner.  He went on to say that Kroes’ support for a US ‘do not track initiative’ also fell short of the Directive’s requirements. One measure he suggested was a default browser setting of non-acceptance for cookies.

Read his whole speech here.

What Happens Now?

More confusion – even the EU can’t seem to agree on what this directive means. Germany and Denmark have aready got a ban on using Google Analytics (from earlier concerns about IP addresses), but many companies in those countries continue to use it, knowing that the risk of being penalized is relatively low. However, for those of us operating in the public sector there’s a risk that we could get some form of all-encompassing edict of ‘no cookie use without consent’ and boom, there goes our main method for collecting data for improving our websites. Sigh. Where do we go from here? I really don’t want to be saying ‘I told you so’ in a few years time.

Google Plus Invites – Get ’em while they’re hot

This link may get you an invite to Google Plus – hopefully there are some left when you get here!

https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3DLx97Iy4Iz00%3A4XcWkY6Raec

If you’re feeling in anyway grateful, then add me to a circle – maybe we can figure out its value together.

What’s the age of a Facebook page? ‘Joined’ vs ‘No more posts to show’

I’ve been posting for the last few months a bunch of data which attempts to compare the performance of Facebook pages in the Swedish higher education sector (here, for example). It’s been bugging me that I did not have a date for the creation of the Facebook pages I look at. Well, I took a deep breath and scrolled through every wall hoping to get a date for when the page was created. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be so simple; the final entry for each page can either be the helpful ‘ XXXX joined Facebook’ or the more enigmatic ‘No more posts to show’. I also added some UK university pages to the data.

Here’s what I got:

The second and third columns are the date of the first post on the wall, after the message ‘XXX joined Facebook’ or ‘No more posts to show’ i.e. as far back as you can scroll down (if you know what I mean).

Page Name	Joined	No more posts to show
Karolinska Institutet	May 2010
Högskolan Väst		June 2009
BTH officiell	September 2010
KTH		August 2009
Högskolan i Halmstad		June 2009
Högskolan Dalarna	March 2010
Högskolan Kristianstad		June 2009
Karlstads Universitet	February 2010
Uppsala University	November 2010
Mälardalans Högskola	October 2010
Jönköping University		August 2009
SLU	March 2010
Uppsala universitet		March 2009
Malmö Högskola		June 2010
Lunds Universitet	June 2010
Lund University	August 2010
Högskolan i Borås	April 2008
Linköping Universitet	May 2010
Linne Universitet		December 2009
Umeå universitet		November 2009
Malmö University	September 2010
Skovde	February 2011
Stockholm University		February 2009
Umeå University		November 2009
Chalmers University of technology		April 2010
Stockholm school of economics		April 2009
Royal Institute of Art	October 2010
Stockholm’s universitet		September 2009
Cambridge		March 2008
Oxford		May 2010
Warwick		June 2009
Bath		September 2009
Bristol
York		January 2008
Sussex		April 2009
Leeds		June 2011
Northumbria	May 2008
Plymouth	March 2008
Plymouth II	June 2011
Brighton
Bradford	June 2011
Sunderland		May 2008
Worcester		June 2010
London South Bank		August 2009
Keele University		December 2007

My suspicion is that the ‘no more posts to show’ message is the same as when the page joined Facebook, but it would be great to confirm this.

A desperate cry for help 

The interweb is surprisingly coy about establishing the age of Facebook pages so I wonder if you can help? If you’re the owner of one of these pages it would be awesome if you could check the date your page was created and then add it in a comment on this post. If you can’t remember that momentous day, then you’ll be able to get it from your insights data. I’d be very grateful, and it would make these data much more robust and hopefully more useful to Facebook heroes like yourself. Bang your date in the comments below and, when I have enough data, I’ll write a new post with the results. I’ll also make sure you’re top of the list when I get around to sending out a white paper about these data and the use of Facebook in Higher Education.

Why is this important?

The number of friends is a fairly weak metric for assessing Facebook success. But, if we want to give it any teeth then comparing it with our peers/competitors pages becomes more robust if we know when their pages were created. That way we can get a rough idea of whether our page’s growth is ‘runaway train give me a pay-rise’ or more ‘damp firework lying in a puddle’ stagnation.

I also think that it would be neat to know exactly how many posts one can see, particularly if you want to go back to an older conversation.

And another thing. The next load of analysis of comments will include a comparison with the UK universities mentioned above, as another way to bench mark the performance of the Swedish Facebook pages analysed here.

Comments: If you leave a comment (and thanks if you do!) it may not appear straight away; looks like the wordpress spam filter is being super sensitive; I’ll keep an eye on the inbox and make sure your post appears here soon as.