Social Media Directories for Higher Education
Social Media Directories are a good way to let your web visitors know where to find your school, college or university in social media.
Economic Crime Institute — Utica College
I was checking out social media channels for Utica College, totally by random, to see how the school’s messages are being sent out and by what means. Of course, there was Twitter for the Admissions and the Athletic departments, but also one that should really be removed: @uceci, the Twitter profile for the Economic Crime Institute. Nothing has been added since January 5, 2014. The website associated with this Twitter account contains errors.
Some Good Examples
I was poking around on some other college websites and I came across Lynchburg College’s Social Media Directory. So, I gassed up the Googler and went out to find some more. Boston’s Emerson College has a good directory that is categorized by department and by platform. Pretty cool!
Univ. of Oklahoma Social Media Directory
The University of Oklahoma has a visually appealing layout that makes finding their channels very easy (see graphic). OU also has a link to their podcasts on iTunes.
Any company, group, college, or other type of organization that uses many social media platforms to channel their messages should consider adding a Social Media Directory to their sites to make it easier to connect and for the organizations to keep better track of their platforms and avoid non-tweeting Twitters and faceless Facebook pages. Lynchburg College, Emerson College and the University of Oklahoma are just three good examples, but there are certainly many more.
As I reviewed these directories, I saw a lot of Facebook and Twitter, some LinkedIn, Google+, Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram. Carnegie-Mellon and RIT include WeiBo. RIT also had listings for Tudou, IMQQ (which returned a 403, forbidden, error), and RenRen. Florida Gulf Coast University includes a few WordPress sites, which were up-to-date and so does Rutgers University. Harvard University and the University of Manchester (UK) list a few SoundCloud sites, which was interesting. American University has Facebook and Twitter feeds right on their Social Media Directory page, as does the Charlottesville, Virginia-based St. Anne’s-Belfield School, which includes Instagram and Vimeo feeds amongst others. Newcastle University (UK) has Storify. The University of Melbourne (Australia) tells you up-front that it has 404 social media sites. I think they should add one more, because when I see the number “404” on a website I immediately think that is a page-not-found error.
FGCU
Carnegie-Mellon University
I haven’t seen much of Vine, although the University of Arizona reports that two-thirds of mobile traffic will be video by 2017. Although, by searching University of Arizona on Vine, the results were, err, unexpected.
Originally published at Jeff Macharyas.
