From BlueFuego’s report, “The State of Higher Ed Facebook Pages 2011”
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College recently received word that their college Facebook page was ranked seventh in the nation of nearly 1000 schools critiqued. BlueFuego, Inc., a firm providing consulting and advice for implementing the social web in higher education, studied schools ranging in size and geography, anywhere from Texas A&M to Harvard to Murray State to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. Of nearly 1400 schools, 972 schools met the criteria for the study.
Sara Palmer, communications manager at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College said, “When we learned BlueFuego ranked us as seventh in the nation for college Facebook engagement, especially up against famous schools like Texas A&M and Harvard, we were very excited and proud. It’s a testament to our hard work, but mostly it just proves that our alums and friends truly care about this place. We are a close-knit community on campus and online.”
BlueFuego, Inc., used the formula of likes plus shares plus comments divided by number of fans. Each school had to have at least 1000 fans and five or more post per month. On the first of every month, they pulled all the interactions from all the posts of the month and averaged them out; this data was a 12-month average of that and the results gave them their rankings.
Palmer said, “We try to engage our alums and the community with a variety of information. From trivia questions to news articles, student achievements to photo hunts, we get them involved in a conversation. They share their memories, congratulate those making new ones and continue building relationships that last much longer than four years.”