14 August 2009 University Fandom

It’s about this time each year that Year 12 students start attending open days across the country to determine which university they’ll attend next year. Of course the course they get offered plays a big part in this, but I know that the student life on campus is something many consider. It’s the reason I chose Caulfield over Clayton for those of you playing at home.

Year 12’s attend open day, but all the universities look good at open day. They ask their older enrolled friends, but probably get mixed results. And the websites are all the same with way too much generic information. So where does today’s Year 12 student turn to? I know if I was about to graduate high school one of the things I’d do is check out the university’s Fan Page on Facebook.

Here’s some of the more popular universities’ Fan Pages…

+ University of Sydney – 5,403 fans
+ La Trobe University – 4,345 fans
+ RMIT University – 4,070 fans
+ University of Melbourne – 1,554 fans
+ Griffith University – 1,321 fans
+ Monash University – 1,022 fans
+ Queensland University of Technology – 1,022 fans
+ Swinburne University – 916 fans
+ Deakin University – 112 fans

Not suggesting it’s definitive, but maybe it’s worth some of these universities pushing their Fan Pages a little more. I realise social media is not all about numbers, but I wonder what objectives each of these universities have set for their Fan Page or if they just jumped on the bandwagon.

Posted by Zac Martin
No Comments
  • carousella
    Posted at August 14, 2009 7:02pm, 14 August Reply

    I think it says more about the type of students attending, rather than the institutions themselves.

  • Zac Martin
    Posted at August 14, 2009 7:06pm, 14 August Reply

    Hmm perhaps. Students on Facebook probably make for a better life on campus/parties etc.

  • Kate Kendall
    Posted at August 15, 2009 1:28am, 15 August Reply

    Nice post Zac. It would be good to see this done with Twitter to see the follower numbers as well. For instance, I just checked out both of the institutions I have connections to – RMIT and Unimelb and would say that RMIT wins hands down in terms of social media engagement strategy. The @Unimelb feed doesn't seem that authentic – it appears that it's written as a student voice on behalf on admin reminding them about dates or events. That or it's quite dry. What do you think?

  • Remer
    Posted at August 15, 2009 2:04pm, 15 August Reply

    i find it interesting that MONSU Caulfield would rank 4th in fan numbers

  • Jimmy
    Posted at August 17, 2009 2:11am, 17 August Reply

    Maybe the number of fans is an indication of how tech savy the students are?

  • Zac Martin
    Posted at August 17, 2009 2:21am, 17 August Reply

    I think there's a couple of different factors here, probably one of the most important is of course that the University itself has very little to do with campus life, but rather the student union. Of course your average Year 12 is not going to know that, so it's all about perception.

    And I think no matter what the case, these Fan Pages should be bigger, and given you can target ads by University it wouldn't be too hard.

    As for Twitter, I don't think many Year 12 students would be sussing out Twitter just yet. Plus I don't think any of the Universities are doing anything amazing with their accounts, or their Fan Pages for that matter.

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