Comments on: Social Web Callouts: Research from BlueFuego!

By: 48% of College Homepages Have Social Media Callouts « Dave Mulder's Blog

48% of College Homepages Have Social Media Callouts « Dave Mulder's Blog — Tue, 11 May 2010 06:13:49 +0000

[...] did some related research on this topic in 2009 and found that 40% of schools had a social web callout on their [...]

By: Nicole Anderson

Nicole Anderson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:02:09 +0000

We put up our “Interact with Emory” page right after 4th of July, with a prominent visual link from our homepage, and several other spots across the .edu.

Though I’m surprised that we get such little traffic on that page [approx. 100 visits per day]. Does this make the case that instead of putting our SWC on their own page that they should just be directly on the homepage?

Granted, it’s not linked from the Admission home YET, but I just don’t see it getting much traffic.

By: Brad J. Ward

Brad J. Ward — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:57:59 +0000

Gotta give the credit to Joe on this one, Karine! He compiled the data, I made the pretty graphs.

Twitter is obviously the social media darling of 2009, and when compared to YouTube it has a lower barrier to begin. Twitter is quick and easy to set up as a communication platform, but should not be at the core of any school’s marketing or recruitment strategy. It’s a great supplement, but other things should definitely come first.

By: Karine Joly

Karine Joly — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:52:06 +0000

Great research, Brad as the SWC give a good (if not perfect) indicator of usage in these institutions.

I’m curious: do you advise folks to use Twitter first, and then think about YouTube or are they just doing it because it is easy, quick and doesn’t take a lot of resources compared to launching an online video initiative?

Twitter over YouTube seems a bit weird when you factor in some usage data, i.e. latest Pew Internet survey from April placing online videos ahead of any Twitter activity.

What do you think?

By: Brad J. Ward

Brad J. Ward — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:24:57 +0000

We’ve come across a few schools who were doing it that way or even paying for a service to host their videos. YouTube seems like the no-brainer, free storage/uploading and a huge potential audience. Their analytics and tracking seem to be getting better by the month as well!

By: Karlyn

Karlyn — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:17:42 +0000

Oh I don’t necessarily need numbers….I’m just curious. It’s something I’ve come across on a few sites and I just wonder the logic behind it.

By: Joe Gaylor

Joe Gaylor — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:11:48 +0000

Karlyn, Yes we did notice several schools are utilizing video across all three pages. We just can’t give you real numbers with this research, as we were looking for YT callouts and embeds only. Maybe another project for next month

By: Karlyn

Karlyn — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:22:00 +0000

I’m going to try to leave this comment one more time

This is all great stuff…and I much prefer this theme to your own one!

Question: Do you find a lot of schools doing video, but not using YouTube to host/embed it?