Nia Wearn's Research & Tech for Teaching

Every year I have a look at how our various social media avenues are fairing. Last year they were numerous and wide ranging. However about a fortnight after I did last years overview Facebook caught up with the fact that ‘Staffs Games Design’ wasn’t a real person. It took them a while, but overnight that profile was changed to a page – which in time merged with the other page we had anyway meaning we kept the best url (https://www.facebook.com/staffsgamesdesign) but lost content. We saved what we could, dusted ourselves off and carried on.

Losing the profile meant we lost a useful, if flawed tool of communication with the students – they’d taken to using Staffs Games Design as an open Q&A forum, and we as a method of highlighting events etc. So we took the move many other have done and started a Current Students Group. We also started an alumni group for good measure and we use that to post jobs etc. I made the decision to keep them public, remind the students that were moderated by the staff and were to be treated as an extension of their university presence. So far, so good – and I think more meaningful communications then the old profile ever allowed. As ever with online communications eyeballs on things are quite high, actual engagement quite low.

The biggest downside to losing the profile comes at this time of year, when we’re trying to engage new students, and any clearing students – SGD’s profile would go add happy on Hello Freshers and the other official / unofficial facebook sites. Having reviewed how I personally interact with my students over social media a few months ago, by not dealing with university related conversation over facebook outside of the groups – I’m in no mood to add them self, or make a ‘Staffs Uni’ account in which to do so. So we have a catch all fb event for Welcome Week to Direct them too – and a little bit of an engagement tool embedded in it:

It had had 33 students engage with it when I check just now, There’s 104 ‘Going’ to the event.

With any luck this will pick up by the time welcome week rolls around next month – and w’ll start to see some engagement between the years.

So that’s a good round up on facebook, howabout other avenues?

• Tumblr is no longer in use – since we have our sexy website instead- It’s not had a new post in 2 years yet has still gained 2 followers – up to 71
• Twitter is good and healthy – Up 295 Follows to 1750
• The FB Page is up 396 Likes to 1525 (The demise of the profile added to this a bit)
• The Linked In group is also still strong – Adding 47 people to bring it up to 417 (engagement in it is still dismal)
• The Youtube channel is also strong – and we’ve been pushing out some nice content – that’s up 65 subscribers to 171
• I think we can all agree Google + is dead, as is foursquare and I can no longer tell how many e-mail sign ups we have.

With that in mind I’ll be doing new counts on the following every August and December – lets see how they go!

For the past few years I’ve been keeping a track of our social media take up – so I knew where to concentrate our efforts. For the first year I updated it monthly – but since then I’ve just taken snapshots on the 8th of August every year.

Here’s this year’s.. (All the relevant posts, including the Ur Post with the magic updating Google Docs chart art tagged as smtrack)

Now in theory all of those are active, but in reality you can see the top hitters – No surprises really, Twitter, Facebook – both profile & page and the Linked in Group.

Of course, this doesn’t really look at engagement – I’m running sumall on that now to have a quick look but it’s interesting in the time I’ve been keeping an eye on this how the landscape changes – Prospective students are much keener to ask question over facebook then e-mail, but only  about half of the facebook users are keen to engage with things (For example, for our Welcome Week event this year we’ve only got one meta event listed, to encourage communication through the years and to catch more students. Of the 250 invites 114 have not yet responded – and Facebook have got rid of the super useful option to send a message to people invited to an event, probably for this very reason)

I also can’t see the landscape changing much more in the next year, we could probably Vine & Instagram more, but realistically it’s going to be photos of things on computers, videos of people in the mocap studio and the occasional Mexican Wave in a lecture theatre.

So, it’s been a year of keeping track of the different numbers of fans, followers, likes and subscribers across all of the places StaffsGamesTech floats around on Social Media – and which are in a tiny way maintained (I’m sure we still are on Myspace, but it’s not really relevant is it)

As a recap they are:

• Tumblr – http://staffsgamesacademy.tumblr.com/
• Twitter – http://twitter.com/#!/staffsgamestech
• Facebook Profile – http://www.facebook.com/staffsgamesdesign
• Main Facebook Page – http://www.facebook.com/staffsunigamestech
• LinkedIn Group – http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2771437
• G+ Profile – https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/118096666922247052838/101189782364135510352/posts
• G+ Page – https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/118096666922247052838/118096666922247052838/posts
• Youtube – http://www.youtube.com/staffsgamestech
• Foursquare – https://foursquare.com/staffsgamestech

Mostly they were all in place anyway, before I started keeping an eye on the numbers, some very well established others a bit of a prod in the dark or newly set up. This also doesn’t really look at reach and how people interact with us on the different mediums.

The first thing to note is that there’s growth on everything, even things like G+ haven’t dropped, their just stagnant – and I still think Google may find the magic switch that suddenly means you can’t live without it – linking it with youtube may do that – maybe, or maybe it will continue to flounder.

The big winners are the one’s you’d expect – Facebook & Twitter – with a good showing on Tumblr & Linked In too. What’s interesting on the facebook side of things, and it’s something I’ve seen on other profiles & pages is many more people are willing to be your friend, then like a page – and interactions seem up on Facebook too – but then I suppose Facebook generates more ‘orignal content’ – with that in mind I’m trying to make sure the Tumblr is updated, even with silly things  – because that’s an easy way to push out content to Facebook and Twitter.

I’m going to keep this up for at least another year – it will be interesting to see if there are spikes – graduation for the LinkedIn Group, Induction for Facebook etc..