Category: measurement

Friday Five: weekend reading

Some interesting stuff for your weekend reading:

  1. Why Lady Gaga matters. Yeah, I know. Weird, huh? But Jessica Krywosa makes a compelling argument that we in higher ed have a lot to learn from this Fame Monster.
  2. Brad J. Ward’s squaredpeg post, Augmented reality in higher ed, show a great example of how one Australian university is using augmented reality [AR] in its student recruitment efforts. (Related from Mashable: Harvard Teams Up With Foursquare For Collegiate Check-Ins.)
  3. Who lives in our content village? Georgy Cohen goes medieval on us with this great post on her blog, Safe Digression.
  4. Introducing…you — Ron Bronson‘s thoughts on connecting with people in the social mediasphere.
  5. 20 tools for tracking social media marketing. Some practical stuff here for your online listening post.

Social media’s impact on website traffic

At the start of this year, I spent some time looking at the Google Analytics information for our website. After reading an interesting post by Ann M. White about social media’s impact on traffic to her institution’s website, I decided to look into that for our site as well.

The analytics from our university website more or less mimic what Ann found at her campus, Oklahoma Christian University. That is, social media as a driver of traffic to a university website composes a very tiny sliver of the pie. So tiny, in fact, that I can’t even illustrate it with a pie chart.

Here’s how it shakes out for our campus:

  • The Missouri S&T website had 7,855,680 visits in 2009
  • 24,685 (0.3 percent) came from Facebook
  • 2,634 (0.03 percent) came from Twitter
  • Facebook ranks as the 11th highest referral source, but far behind the usual suspects (direct, Google, Blackboard, Yahoo, Bing)
  • Twitter ranks 40th in terms of referrals to the main website, a few notches below StumbleUpon and tied with the University of Texas

The relatively low numbers don’t mean social media is insignificant to your online presence, however. It could be that those visits to your website might not have happened without social media. As Ann says in her post, “I choose to think of it as ‘wow, those are all deliberate hits that we wouldn’t get without social media.’ Hooray!”

I’d be interested in hearing how these averages compare with other campuses. Does anyone else (besides Ann and me) look at this kind of information? If so, please share.