Ivy Plus on Social Media

by David Lee

June 18, 2012

As Ivy Plus quickly approaches us, I felt that it would be interesting to apply a similar analysis Harvey did for Forbes’ list of “America’s Best Prep Schools” to the list of schools participating. This list includes Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, MIT and Yale.

In a similar fashion, I’ve gathered the 1) Facebook likes of each colleges fan page, 2) Twitter followers of each college’s Twitter account, and 3) the LinkedIn members in each college’s alumni groups.

*The graphs below weighs these numbers by dividing them over the number of students the entire university has (undergraduate + graduate students) and puts these values on a scale of 10 to determine which Ivy League school best employs social networks as a means to not only reach more prospective students but also build a means to stay in contact with alumni.

Facebook Likes

As the graph portrays, Harvard takes the cake within the Facebook realm. No surprise for Harvard claims Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. “Facebook likes” alone are not a good measure of a college’s use of social network for this reason – this brings us to Twitter.

Twitter Followers

Once again, looking at Twitter followers, Harvard is also in the lead. Stanford, Princeton, and Yale also seem to making strong strides by weighing over a 5 score mark.

Twitter Tweets

Additionally, I took a tally of the number of tweets by each of these universities as a better measure of a college’s social media use and reach. This number is not weighted, for the number of tweets a school has should not be affected by its enrollment.

LinkedIn Members

Looking at LinkedIn members, I believe, is the best measure (of the three popular networks) to determine which Ivy League school is best at employing social media to build an alumni network. This is because all of these groups in particular are restricted to people affiliated to the university. Using the weighted value above, MIT appears to be the leader in leveraging LinkedIn as a tool to build an alumni network.

*A side note: most of these colleges have LinkedIn groups run not by employees of the school but by alumni of the university. Additionally, some schools have LinkedIn groups that target strictly alumni and current students (Columbia) while others target a wider range including alumni, students, faculty and friends of the University (Brown). This may skew the data.

Other LinkedIn Data

Lastly, I also thought it would be interesting to use the tools I learned about in EverTrue’s LinkedIn for Alumni Prospect Research and Engagement Webinar to determine what type of communities exists in each of these college’s LinkedIn Alumni networks. Within minutes (after watching the video of course), I was able to gather the following data. As an aspiring designer, I couldn’t help but compose the infographic below.

Hope that all schools attending have a great time at this year’s Ivy Plus.

Inspired by this infographic.

http://www.alumnifutures.com Andy Shaindlin

Fun exercise, but it seems to me that the data you are looking at here don’t form anything approaching a coherent assessment of each school’s effectiveness with these tools.

By themselves, inputs (likes, followers, group members) are meaningless, because they’re not associated with specific outcomes (such as increased giving, satisfaction, engagement).

There’s also no way to know who the “likers” and followers are. It’s risky to presume Harvard’s followers are alumni (for example). How do we extract “better at staying in contact with alumni” from this?

Finally, what do the graphs actually depict? Harvard’s weighted Facebook “likes” number looks like it’s about 100 times higher than Dartmouth’s. So…is Harvard 100 times better than Dartmouth? If so, better at what? 100 times more effective? Popular? Interesting? Or just 100 times more likely to have a unique user “like” it on Facebook? Or something else?

It’s fun to crunch numbers, but we have to be very careful before we draw conclusions about what the numbers mean, unless we can connect the numbers to achievements in the real world.
http://www.evertrue.com Brent Grinna

Hey Andy,

Thanks for reading, as always! The goal of this post was to have some fun crunching some numbers. Drawing insights from analysis is important and we could have taken a stronger stance on some of the points above.

In the future, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to do things like draw correlations about whether alumni who follow your institution on twitter are more likely to give, or whether an alum who likes your school on facebook is more likely to attend reunion. We can form hypotheses today, but we don’t have access to donor data that would allow us to close the loop on this analysis.

You do have access to both whom your followers & likers are and giving & engagement data. I’m curious whether you or other peers have been able to draw conclusions between CMU “likes”, followers or group members and giving data or event attendance.

Carnegie Mellon has 24 “official” Facebook pages and 24 official Twitter accounts listed here:
http://www.cmu.edu/social-media/

While many of those aren’t tailored to alumni specifically, we’d love to learn how you or other advancement leaders think about justifying the investments in human capital required to maintain such a comprehensive social media presence.

Or put another way, how do you connect CMU’s investments to achievements in the real world? We continue to seek examples of how ROI is being calculated in traditional alumni communications.

Dave wrote this post during a summer internship between his sophomore and junior year of college. We all have a long way to go in regards to rigorously analyzing data, but I’m proud of Dave’s efforts to crunch some numbers and have some fun.

Ever True!
Brent
http://www.alumnifutures.com Andy Shaindlin

Great feedback, and relevant questions for us. I am very interested in crunching our own numbers (some of which you refer to above). Love the discussion, your blog posts are great drivers of progress for all of us.
@KeithHannon

Very interesting data. For Ivy Plus, I think it would be more valuable to examine each school’s alumni accounts for each network. Since the people attending the conference are all in alumni relations, it would be a great conversation starter to know who is using these tools the best from an alumni engagement angle. In our case, how Cornell University uses their FB page and how we use the Cornell Alumni Association page are very different and I’m sure most of the schools would say the same thing.

Great data though, appreciate you taking the time to put it together!
http://www.evertrue.com Brent Grinna

Ditto…we’ve been working on some APIs that could help with some of this. We’d love to collaborate on this sort of analysis. We’ll keep you posted and please do the same!
@KieraReilly

Great comments by Andy, and Brett, and Keith, who is thinking what I’m thinking – how are the University accounts different than the alumni accounts, and how is each Ivy Plus AR school utilizing, and then analyzing, their social media outreach. #ivyplusar

EverTrue