Facebook fan pages - a status update

On Facebook, a lot can happen in a little while. It's been only two years since the world’s most popular social networking site launched "fan pages," allowing businesses and organizations to create their own profiles. Like staff at many other universities, I immediately claimed "Dalhousie University" and began building a presence for our school, but I wasn't convinced that there was significant value in it. With limited messaging ability and poor opportunities for two-way communication, pages were little more than glorified landing sites for anyone searching for a university on Facebook. We kept our ambitions modest, to say the least.

That all changed this past March when Facebook updated fan pages to match their most recent site redesign. In doing so, they gave pages the ability to have status updates that "fans" could respond to. But more importantly, page admins were given access to the news feed. Now, when schools post a news story or an event, users who have signed up as fans receive the update alongside updates from all their friends, right on the homepage – Facebook's prime real estate - and fans are able to respond directly in the feed. Forget landing sites -- Facebook fan pages suddenly became useful, valuable two-way communications tools.

So eight months later, how are we all doing?

Inspired by an American study examining how the U.S. News & World Report Top 100 colleges were using Twitter, I decided to spend some time last week perusing dozens of institutional Facebook fan pages for Canadian universities – 60 in total – and put together a rudimentary, "by-the-numbers" assessment. In doing so, I skipped fan pages designed for niche audiences (alumni, prospective students, departments or faculties) and focused purely on overall institutional pages. I confess as well that I did not go through the work of discerning if the pages were actually run by the institution. (That said, since universities can have unauthorized fan pages removed under Facebook's terms of service, I can only presume that the ones that exist are either official or tolerated.)

In the end, I collected far more data than I could possibly share here – and certainly more than I know what to do with – but here are a few of my favourite tidbits:

- As I expected, big schools have more fans: of the 20 schools in Canada with the most fans, 14 have student populations of over 15,000. The 10 largest universities in Canada average 2,539 fans each.

- But when we calculate the number of fans relative to student population - a school's "fans-per-student" - that all changes: only four schools with more than 15,000 students make the top 20. Smaller universities have an average fans-per-student ratio almost four times higher than larger ones, indicating a far greater success rate at converting their population into Facebook fans. Given that smaller schools are generally known for their intimate, enthusiastic communities, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this.

- I initially suspected that a school's success at recruiting Facebook fans was connected to how often their page is updated. Looking through the numbers, though, this doesn't seem to be the case: the most popular pages – both in real numbers and in fans-per-student – are all over the place in terms of the number of posts they've made in the past month. I’d wager that fans generally don't take a page's activity into account when making the initial decision to sign up.

- When it comes to courting fan activity, a couple of variables stand out. Nearly all the schools with a high number of interactions have 1,000 fans or more, which seems to be the tipping point at which fan activity increases significantly. But what matters most is the amount of posts - the 10 schools with the most fan interactions have updated, on average, 26 times in the past month. This makes sense when you consider how Facebook works: fans are far more likely to respond to a school's update on their home page than to visit the fan page directly and post something of their own. Without content to respond to, most Facebook fans have little to say.

- Several universities appear to be syndicating their posts from a blog, news site or RSS feed. The danger in doing so is the risk of diminishing returns: overwhelm your fans with content and they’ll be less likely to read or respond to each item. Some schools are still very successful at earning fan interactions for their automated posts; others are falling quite short. I suspect that the quality of the content makes all the difference.

- Of the 60 school pages I looked at, almost a third – 17, to be precise – were inactive, having not been updated in the past month. What's more, eight of these pages have more than 1,000 fans. While many of them don't appear to have ever been updated, a handful were generating significant content earlier this year, suggesting they’ve been abandoned or neglected in recent months.

- Given that we all measure success by our own unique goals and objectives, I hesitate to single out the "most successful" Facebook fan page among the Canadian universities I looked at. But from a purely quantitative assessment, one stands above the rest: Bishop’s. Not only is it the only school in Canada that I found with more Facebook fans than its student population, but the school's page also can claim more fan interactions than any other university (291 in the past month alone).

As for Dalhousie, I’m pleased with how we’re doing so far. We’re among the top 10 schools in terms of generating fan interaction, and our fan base – quite solid for our size – has grown significantly over the summer months. We’re constantly tracking which posts generate the most traffic to our website and modifying our strategies accordingly. And I feel as if we’ve barely begun to engage our internal community in generating content and conversation on our page – so much more to do.

All that said, where do we go from here? We're only eight months into this Facebook experiment, after all, and we’re all shaping best practices as we go. I encourage everyone who is managing a Facebook fan page for a college or university to take some time and look at what other schools are doing. There's obviously a lot to learn from each other – and far more to consider than just the numbers.

And if your school hasn't yet established an institutional Facebook fan page for whatever reason – or you're one of the schools hosting an inactive page – perhaps it's time to re-evaluate whether Facebook has a place within your communications or marketing strategies. Your "fans" are likely on Facebook already, and may be just waiting for you to start the conversation.