Further to the Peer Index ranking posted by my colleague Niall Cook, it is interesting to see the different social media integration strategies – or apparent absence of strategy – employed by the Russell and 1994 Groups, usually thought to comprise Britain’s top universities.
We looked at ‘social’ links on each university’s Home, About or Contact pages. Of the 39 members of these two groups:
- More than one third, 14 in all, have no social links at all
- About two thirds, or 25, have at least one Twitter account link
- 21 have a Facebook page link
- 17 have a YouTube link
- 11 have a Flickr link
- 6 have an iTunes U link
What does this say about the degree of integration by these universities of their social and traditional web strategies? Answers will vary university by university but, on the face of it, it looks like many are failing to make any connection between the two at all. For example, all universities in the group have Twitter accounts… including those with no links to these accounts on their websites.
I am confused. Can anyone think of a good reason why you would not want to put social links on your website?
I can only think it must be because of some fear of sending traffic away from the main site but that’s hardly a good enough reason. Seems daft to make it more difficult for potential students to find you on social networks if they want to.
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