Killer Facebook Data (That you can’t get from insights…or anywhere else for that matter)

Here’s some killer statistics from the Facebook page which I curate which fits both the ‘shock and awe’ and ‘frickin’ useful’ categories:

Between August 2011 and January 2012 friends of the page left 348 posts.
– 60% of these were related to making an application, or a question about our degrees
– 30% of them were practical questions about studying at Malmö
– 10% were links to events, jobs or other content

Simple take home? 90% of the posts we received in that 6 month period were about applying, splendid!

These data tell me that our page is totally supporting the current goals we have for Facebook – our strategy is to specifically focus on using Facebook for customer service and encourage prospective students to contact us via the wall.

How did we get these data? The hard way – my awesome colleague @idarosqvist went through our page with a pen and paper categorising the posts we had received. Definitely not the world’s most glamorous task but it results in some simple, easy to understand numbers which gives both insight (we’re on target with our strategy) and a set of data which allays the fears of those who worry that our page’s wall is full of random nonsense.

If you’ve got a billion friends, and a wall to match, then this probably is not for you; but if you’ve got a ‘regular’ page then taking a foray into your wall, armed with pen and paper, may give you some great insights and some awesome data to report.

(We didn’t look at comments, that would have taken too much time. The sentiment of the posts was largely positive or neutral, as tends to be the case with comments as well).

Facebook Timeline Arrives For Pages

Timeline has arrived for pages, and can now be enabled immediately (or automatically comes into effect on the 30th March). There’s already a few Swedish university pages, who are early adopters including  Umeå Universitet, Umeå University and Högskolan Väst. Here’s a few of my thoughts.

Look and Feel.
The new pages just look far better, the presence of the larger picture makes for a better visual impact and creates more opportunities for associating the page with campaign imagery used elsewhere.

Umeå university's Swedish Facebook page with timeline activated.

Commenting.
This is the part which worries me. All the pages I’ve looked at, which have timeline activated, now show comments in a separate box called ‘Recent posts by others’ with a truncated  snippet. If you’re using the page as a service platform, as my employer does, then there could be a risk that the first time visitor does not get to see that posts are answered quickly and with good answers. Timeline places a greater emphasis on posts from the page owners which may not be the main priority of all pages – this has implications for your content and posting strategy on Facebook. Tabs also, are not as obvious as they were previously.

Posts by page friends receive less priority in the new Facebook timeline layout (click for a bigger image)

Landing pages are now a thing of the past but you can get more data from a page’s insights tab, as a page friend. The completely awesome allfacebook blog is an extremely useful source of information about this, but it’s also worth checking out Facebook’s own guidelines for Timeline (which includes what you can and cannot do with the picture).

Swedish Kommuns and Facebook – a quick and dirty review

The other day I was struck by the thought ’I wonder how Swedish Kommun Facebook pages compare’ – so I took a look, and the results are presented here ( a ‘kommun’ is the Swedish equivalent of a British ‘county’ – an administrative region). Before we get stuck in, a few comments on the data:

First – there’s a ton of data missing; I certainly will have missed pages, nor have I spent time looking at how many Facebook pages a kommun might have. Nor have I made any kind of assessment of their overall communication strategy (they may stink at Facebook but throw great parties). I tried to check but it may well be that the pages I understood to be representing the Kommun are entirely ‘unofficial’ and actually administrated by small dogs.

Second – I’ve only looked at number of friends (not a particularly sharp metric) and number of posts left by page friends (a slightly better metric, but I only looked at February). I’ve not looked at comments left on posts (life is too short).

Third –  I’ve not looked at the age of the pages, so the friends metric is pretty useless for figuring out growth rate.

Kommun Facebook Pages – List
Here’s all the data in a spread-sheet. Hat tip to Obiz24 for publishing their survey of Swedish kommuns, which got me off to a good start.

Number of Friends – bubble chart

Click on this to get a bubble representation of the number of Facebook friends these Kommun pages had in Feb 2012.

Karlstad Kommun’s Facebook page stands head and shoulders above the others with just over 12282 friends, way more than any of the others I looked at; most struggle to get more than 1000 friends.  No surprise, they also had the most posts left by page friends.

According to Wikipedia, there are 290 Swedish Kommuns, with a massively varying population in each. If one assumes that most of Karlstad’s Facebook page friends actually live in the kommun then they have around 14% of their citizens as friends – definitely a significant communication channel. Not everybody enjoys such success – Eskilstuna, with the second most Friends, theoretically only has 2% of their citizens as Friends.

Number of Posts – bubble chart

Click to see number of posts left on the Kommun Facebook pages, during February.

12 of the Kommuns I looked at have their walls well and truly shut, with no posts allowed. Another 21 Kommun pages failed to get any posts from their friends in February (remember, I’ve not looked at any other months or comments left on posts). Generally, the amount of posts is quite low. Several of the Kommuns have a few ‘activists’ who post several times.

Lots of Numbers – So What?

How do you use this? First, given the large amount of energy often expended on discussing how social media is used in the public sector it’s a provoking reflection that – with regards to the Facebook pages I looked at here – the direct audience (i.e. the total number of friends) seems to be quite low. Second, with a few exceptions the level of engagement (‘shudder’ – what does that word really mean?) is also low – page friends do not seem to post or comment that much.  If you’re investing in your Facebook page then you could maybe use these data as a benchmarking tool, and spot those kommuns which seem to be having success (though it all comes back to your strategy and goal).

Is your page missing? What would make this analysis more useful? Have I made a colossal #fail?  – let me know in the comments box below!

Swedish University Facebook Pages Review – Posts in January 2012.

Here’s the data for January for the Facebook activity of Swedish universities, ranked by the number of posts left on their walls. December was relatively quiet in comparison to January; some pages received more than double the number of comments in January, compared to December.  (December’s data will be presented in a review of the previous 12 months which I’ll prepare next month.) International pages are the most active, which is no surprise, given that this is the main application period. 5 university pages still do not allow posts to be left.

In January, the pages with the most posts were Malmö (112 posts) and Uppsala’s (104 posts) English Facebook pages. Uppsala experienced considerable gains from last month, with an increase in 30% in the number of posts. Lund University’s page is ranked 3rd, with 67 posts.

Malmö University	112
Uppsala University	104
Lund University	67
Linne Universitet	64
Uppsala universitet	41
Linköping Universitet	33
Lunds Universitet	21
Högskolan i Borås	21
Umeå universitet	21
Umeå University	20
Högskolan i skövde	18
KTH	17
Malmö Högskola	14
Mittuniversitetet	12
Jönköping University	11
Karlstads Universitet	9
SLU	9
Göteborg Universitet	9
Högskolan i Halmstad	8
Mälardalans Högskola	8
Chalmers University of technology	8
Högskolan Dalarna	7
BTH officiell	5
University of Borås	5
Linnaeus University, Sweden	5
Högskolan Kristianstad	4
Mid Sweden Uni	4
Karlstad University	3
Högskolan i Jönköping	2
Högskolan Väst	1

Ranking of Swedish University Facebook pages, by posts left by page friends during January 2012 (+/-5)

What’s the Value of this?
Well, that kinda of depends on you. If the aim of your Facebook activities is to build a relationship between yourself and prospective students then you’ll probably want to see lots of posts on your wall. If, on the other hand, you are more interested in profiling your university online then you may be more  interested in comments and likes – though posts will still be important – in getting a more viral effect for your content. So, only a few comments may not necessarily mean bad things (and you may well be being awesome on other channels) but it could equally be a sign that, currently, you have not given any compelling reason why people should connect with you on your wall. In a subsequent post I’ll be showing a simple way of evaluating a page, and presenting the results, to get a handle on the type of posts being left.

Swedish University Facebook Page Growth

I’m putting together the latest results of my review of Swedish university Facebook activity, in the mean time here’s an overview of page growth – measure by friends – from a selection of English language Facebook pages maintained by Swedish universities.

Swedish university 'English' Facebook pages - number of friends. Click picture to make it less squinty.

As usual, if you see any errors or #fail in the data – please let me know! This kind of data will be included in a year in review report I hope to publish later in the spring.

November Review – Facebook Page Comments – Swedish Universities Ranking

Here’s the November ranking for Swedish universities’ Facebook pages – based off the number of comments which their friends left on their walls, during the last month. This does not include comments left on posts by the page, or additional comments in a longer discussion. I’ve divided it into English and Swedish language pages.

Swedish language Facebook Pages

Overall, Linne Universitet’s wall saw the biggest increase in posting, with a growth of 20% since last month. There’s some international activity on the wall, which contributes to the growth, but the content seems to be mostly from students on campus; for example the sharing of blog posts or for sale notices.  The Karolinska Institutet, The Royal College of Art and Stockholm’s Universitet’s walls remain closed for posts.

Linne Universitet	60
Lunds Universitet	29
Linköping Universitet	27
Uppsala universitet	22
Högskolan i Borås	22
Högskolan i skövde	19
Mittuniversitetet	17
Högskolan i Halmstad	16
Mälardalans Högskola	13
Umeå universitet	13
KTH	11
Karlstads Universitet	11
Malmö Högskola	11
Högskolan i Jönköping	11
Högskolan i Jönköping	11
SLU	10
Högskolan Dalarna	6
Göteborg Universitet	6
BTH officiell	3
Högskolan Kristianstad	2
Högskolan Väst	1

English Language Facebook Pages

Malmö University sits at the top of this part of the ranking, with a page where posts are almost entirely questions about studying at Malmö, or how to make an application. Lund University, in second place, also has a wall dominated by questions about applying to Lund.  Uppsala, whilst enjoying fewer posts, shows a similar trend towards questions about making an application. Stockholm University and the Stockholm School of Economics walls’ remain closed.

Malmö University	56
Lund University	48
Uppsala University	22
Jönköping University	14
Umeå University	13
Chalmers University of technology	6
Karlstad University	6
Karlstad University	6
University of Borås	2

Some Quick Reflections

A few things occurred to me when I was preparing this month’s ranking.

Number of friends versus number of posts
A high number of friends is obviously great for reach and getting your content visible across the web. Lund University, for example, gets a high number of likes and shares for some of their posts which presumably leads to a healthy amount of inbound traffic to their page, and website. But, once again there’s little relationship between number of friends and number of posts;  Lund University has 5 times as many friends as Malmö University, yet they both have similar levels of posts.

Exceed expectations
The student’s question that you ignored or dismissed with a short, terse answer? There’s another university giving them red carpet treatment.  In the last month I noticed, on several different occasions, the same student posting the same question on different university’s walls (yes, your customers are fickle – get over it). The tone and level of support tended to vary. Enough to make them not choose your university? Hard to say; but maybe enough to drop you from 1^st to 2^nd choice. Exceed the expectations of your Facebook friends, the extra effort does not cost much and will reap rewards.

Don’t be shy about your social ecosystem
Chances are, the page I include here isn’t your only one – you’ll have an ecosystem of different pages representing Faculties, programmes or research activities, for example. Quick tips – make sure your pages are liking each other;  don’t rely on the Facebook search engine to show up your other pages. Also, encourage cross posting from one page to another;  get administrators from a particular page to post, using their own page’s identity; when appropriate this is a powerful way of drawing attention to the competence and presence you have on Facebook.

Facebook Page Friends – November review of Swedish university Facebook pages

 

It’s just an arbitrary threshold, but the Lund University marketing team have something to celebrate as they manage the first university Facebook page, in Sweden, to have more than 10 000 friends. In the last month they gained over 500 new friends, which pushed them up to 10 300 friends. It’s interesting that the first page to achieve this is an English language page, rather than a Swedish one. Even though the need for communication with the university is higher for international students, the number of Swedish speaking students would – you’d think – mean that the universities’ Swedish pages would be larger than they are. Something like 95% of our youngest target group (Data from Svenskarna och Internet 2011) for bachelor degrees, are using social networks in Sweden – so why their absence from these pages I wonder?

CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Flickr Alamagordo

All of the universities’ Facebook pages  – regardless of which language they use – are showing a reduction in friend growth compared to last month.

This month, Göteborg Universitet, KTH, University of Borås, Malmö University and Jönköping show some of the highest percentage growths; but, in real numbers of friends, some of this growth is very small. If you’re working to get more friends, then maybe you need to revisit your strategy, or not, as the case may be (Though it’s worth repeating that the total number of friends should not be the metric you’re focusing on to measure your page’s success).

I’ll be following this post up in a few days with an analysis of the commenting frequency on these pages (altogether more relevant than just looking at numbers of friends) – I just know you can’t wait.

If your page is missing, just let me know in the comments, thanks.

Facebook Pages in English, ranked by number of friends.

University Page	Friends	% Growth, from last month	Increase in friends, since last month
Lund University	10307	5	524
Stockholm University	5596	2	113
Umeå University	5361	3	160
Jönköping University	3501	1	62
Chalmers University of technology	3151	2	69
Stockholm school of economics	2517	1	42
Malmö University	1982	6	127
Uppsala University	1452	5	82
Karlstad University	1364	n/a	n/a
Mid Sweden Uni	817	4	38
University of Borås	533	7	36

Facebook Pages in Swedish, ranked by  number of friends.

University Page	Friends	% Growth, from last month	Increase in friends, since last month
Linköping Universitet	8823	1	128
Umeå universitet	6235	1	64
Linne Universitet	6010	1	57
Stockholm University	5596	2	113
Uppsala universitet	4772	3	121
KTH	3721	10	329
Lunds Universitet	3610	5	166
Högskolan i Borås	3487	1	11
Högskolan i Skövde	3091	1	20
SLU	3053	3	92
Karolinska Institutet	2887	4	106
Mittuniversitetet	2661	1	16
Mälardalans Högskola	2533	3	71
Högskolan i Halmstad	2291	2	41
Högskolan Väst	2268	2	45
Stockholm’s universitet	2089	3	61
Malmö Högskola	1556	2	36
Karlstads Universitet	1474	3	47
Royal Institute of Art	1118	3	32
Göteborg Universitet	772	25	152
Högskolan Dalarna	653	1	2
BTH officiell	596	2	9
Högskolan i Jönköping	530	7	33
Högskolan Kristianstad	451	2	9

Facebook Page Friends – Monthly review of Swedish university Facebook pages

Following on from my post below, looking at comments, here’s the ranking of Swedish university Facebook pages by numbers of friends. There’s a tendency for more growth taking place on the English language pages, which is not unsurprising, given that many Swedish universities now have opened for international applications.  On the Swedish Facebook pages, there’s a range of growth rates, with some pages looking positively stagnant. KTH is notable, with their continuation of brisk, rapid growth.

Swedish University English Facebook Pages – Ranked by number of Friends on November 7th

(percentage in brackets is the increase from last month)

Page	Number of Friends
Lund University	9783 (7%)
Stockholm University	5483 (4%)
Umeå University	5201 (4%)
Jönköping University	3439 (2%)
Chalmers University of Technology	3082 (5%)
Stockholm School of Economics	2475 (2%)
Malmö University	1855 (5%)
Uppsala University	1370 (7%)
Royal Institute of Art	1086 (2%)
Mid Sweden Uni	779 (6%)
University of Borås	497 (5%)

Swedish Universities Swedish Facebook Pages – Ranked by number of Friends on November 7th

Page	Number of Friends
Linköping Universitet	8695 (2%)
Umeå Universitet	6171 (1%)
Linne universitet	5953 (1%)
Uppsala Universitet	4651 (5%)
Högskolan i Borås	3476 (1%)
Lunds Universitet	3444 (6%)
KTH	3392 (15%)
Högskolan i Skövde	3071 (1%)
SLU	2961 (2%)
Karolinska Institutet	2781 (8%)
Mitt Universitet	2645 (2%)
Mälardalans Högskola	2462 (5%)
Högskolan i Halmstad	2250 (2%)
Högskolan Väst	2223 (2%)
Stockholms universitet	2028 (6%)
Malmö Högskola	1520 (4%)
Karlstads universitet	1427 (5%)
Högskolan Dalarna	651 (2%)
BTH	587 (2%)
Högskolan i jönkoping	497 (6%)
Högskolan Kristianstad	442 (8%)

Facebook Page Comments – Monthly review of Swedish university Facebook pages

Another month passes, and we’re out of the national application period and into the beginnings of the frenzy of international recruitment. The overriding trend is that almost all pages saw a drop in comments, only the English pages saw similar numbers to last month – but even they showed a reduction in the number of comments. Chalmers School of Technology have opened their wall for comments, but 6 others still remain closed.

Comments

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

Page	Comments left by page friends
Malmö University	41
Lund University	38
Uppsala University	11
Jönköping University	12
Mid Sweden Uni	15
Stockholm University	Wall closed
University of Borås	2
Stockholm School of Economics	Wall closed
Umeå University	Wall closed
Chalmers School of Technology	1

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

Page	Comments left by page friends
Linne Universitet	45
Mälardalans Högskola	25
Uppsala universitet	23
Linköping Universitet	23
Högskolan i Skövde	22
Lunds Universitet	20
Högskolan i Borås	17
Karlstads Universitet	14
Högskolan i Jönköping	12
Högskolan i Halmstad	11
Mittuniversitetet	11
KTH	10
SLU	8
Malmö Högskola	8
Umeå universitet	8
Högskolan Kristianstad	6
BTH officiell	4
Högskolan Dalarna	4
Högskolan Väst	1
Karolinska Institutet	Wall closed
Royal Institute of Art	Wall closed
Stockholms Universitet	Wall closed

My top tip for this month – open up your Google Analytics account, create a segment called ‘Social Media’ which includes Facebook, Blogs and Twitter and then apply it to your visitor traffic. For extra marks combine it with another segment, such as international visitors. Hopefully you’ll see an upward curve of traffic, particularly if you’ve been investing in Social Media – bask in the glory, but also consider how you can continue to drive this traffic. Ping me if you need advice on creating advanced segments.

Activity and Influence

I was struck by a post I read recently ‘confusing-activity-with-influence‘. In particular the line ‘..growing acceptance that activity somehow relates to influence’. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and have already touched on this previously with the observation that pages with relatively low numbers of friends can still have lots more comments than pages with far more friends.  This notion of influence intrigues me, as this is what – presumably – most of us are striving after; I’ll soon be buckling down to an analysis of comments from the pages I look at in this review which will give more of a measurement of influence, rather than just activity.

Update: I’d missed off the number of comments from Högskolan i Jönköping from the above tables, they are included now. Thanks to @ollehallberg for letting me know.

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!