The Social Web Team

You can now hear the latest tales from the basement of Heslington Hall on our official Twitter account.

We’ll use it to keep our followers updated about new and current projects we’re working on, the latest news and information from the team, and our thoughts on web issues and developments.

Support queries and requests for work are tough to answer in 140 characters, so please send those to web-office@york.ac.uk as normal.

You can follow us at @UoYwebteam

You can also see the latest University news on the University's official twitter, @UniofYork, and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/universityofyork.

Social media and graduation

The University's class of 2011 graduated over three days of ceremonies on campus just over a month ago.

For the first time, we made just a tiny effort to coordinate some social media activity around the event. The media would have us believe that everyone and their dog are using Twitter and such like to document their every move, so a big day like graduation would surely be all over social media. Wouldn't it?

What we did

We actually did very little to encourage or promote the use of social media. We did kick around ideas such as asking Greg Dyke, Chancellor of the University, to ask the ceremony audience to take photos and submit them, but we didn't want to run before we walked! So in the end, we just did the following:

• Posted a few tweets on the University's @uniofyork account announcing the official hashtag, #UoYGraduation
• Posted a message encouraging sharing on Facebook and mentioning the hashtag
• Added the hashtag to our digital signage displays around campus

Did anything happen?

There were 50 or so tweets featuring the hashtag, quite a number of which were retweets and a number of those were from other University accounts (see an archive on the #UoYGraduation TwapperKeeper record). We also kept a look out for @uniofyork mentions and combinations of keywords including york, university, graduation and graduate. Here there were quite a few more graduation-related updates, but still only in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Intriguingly, there were mentions of lots of photos being online, but very few surfaced publicly so I suspect these all reside in private albums on Facebook. A few photos and a couple of videos have shown up on Flickr and YouTube respectively, but that's all.

Was it worth it?

I think it was worth a try. It was all very last-minute and we really didn't do very much to get the word out, so our expectations weren't particularly high but nor did it take much of our time. What was a bit of a surprise was the relative lack of unprompted activity. For all the media hype, it seems our recent graduates and their families are mostly not keen Twitter-ers.

Graduation on Storify.com

Despite the relatively low volume of activity, I stitched together a Storify.com story of the day which I think is actually quite neat. Check out the University of York Graduation 2011 on Storify to see for yourself.

Facebook's community page muddle

Facebook recently changed how user profiles are presented. They now include neat little links, including to the University you work for or study at. This seems like a nice enough feature on the surface, but Facebook have really botched the implementation.



One would reasonably expect that if an official page sharing the name of your employer or university exists that it would be the page Facebook would link to. That's what happened for me, and I thought "Great, lots more traffic to our page and maybe some more 'likes' :)".

But, unfortunately, Facebook doesn't always link to our official page. Indeed, it usually doesn't. Instead, Facebook often creates a link to one of the vast number of 'Community' pages that it has automatically created. There are so many that I gave up counting them. These pages pull in combinations of Wikipedia content about the University, posts from other University pages and even public posts by ordinary Facebook users that mention the University. I'd probably quite like some of that functionality for our official page, but nope, we just get lots and lots of duplicate pages to confuse users - thanks Facebook!

Most of these Community Pages only have a few 'likes', but some are into the low hundreds. These 'like' counts will surely climb as users follow the links from profiles. We can 'claim ownership' of some of the Community Pages, but there are no docs about what happens if we do and Facebook's support forums feature folk nervous about pressing the button in case it impacts a pre-existing official page. Facebook apparently used to provide a 'Suggest the official page' option on Community Pages, but it's no longer there (it was mentioned in a couple of blog posts when community pages launched). So as far as I can tell, there's nothing we can do.

So, if there's nothing we can do, what's the point of this post? I guess I've several vague goals:

1. To highlight that if you want to 'Like' us on Facebook then be sure to do so on our official University of York page (if your profile has auto-linked to something else, I don't think there's an easy way to fix that unfortunately - the only workaround I've seen is a bit geeky)
2. To contribute to a groundswell of dissatisfaction being expressed by page owners everywhere. Facebook have done none of us any favours with this and hopefully will soon fix it.
3. On the offchance that I've missed something and anyone in our small band of readers can help, to say we'd love to hear of a way to fix this ourselves - please get in touch if you've any tips!

Accidentally building an audience on Facebook

It's almost exactly three years since I set up the University's Facebook Page, as part of the landgrab when 'Pages' were first introduced. Since then we've done very little with the page other than keeping it ticking over. I've kept a slow trickle of updates flowing into our stream, usually press releases or public lecture listings, but very little else.

Given the lack of effort expended, it's been to a bit of a surprise to realise of late that our Facebook Page has become rather popular. We're approaching 6000 'likes'. We've almost trebled our number of 'likes' in 12 months, with a big spike when A-level results came out but continuing to grow at 50 - 80 new ones per week (see images below). This is especially impressive given that we've never posted a link on the homepage or main student pages of the website.





Our levels of interaction are relatively low; we get tiny numbers of 'likes' or comments on most posts and almost no questions on our wall, though we do very little to encourage any. But last night when I posted an update about our presence on University Challenge we picked up half a dozen comments and 45+ 'likes' within the hour. We also know that we get a small spike in traffic to stories on the website or videos on YouTube when we post them on Facebook. In short, it's clear that there's an audience out there and that it's comprised of people who, having sought us out, are interested in what we have to say (especially when we say something interesting!)

The ambition of Facebook's expansion - the changes to Messages announced yesterday, the Foursquare-style checkins, the open graph Facebook-isation of the whole Web and persistent rumours about ventures into search and mobile - mean users may well soon be spending even more time in Facebook. For the forseeable future we'll be continuing with our light touch approach, but as Facebook grows and our audience on Facebook grows too, we may find that we've accidentally grown a valuable communications channel deserving of much more attention.

Related info: For anyone wondering if their department or office should be on Facebook (or Twitter, or LinkedIn etc.), we're producing some guidelines to help you decide and to help you do it well if you do take the plunge. These aren't quite ready yet, but they're coming (better late than never!) In the meantime, feel free to contact us for individual help and advice.