A league table of universties’ social media ‘visibility’
Econsultancy have published a league table of Russell Group universities’ social media profiles or their ‘visibility’:
The visibility score we use here is based on the total number of links a web domain has scored on the six social sites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious and StumbleUpon, while accounting for different weightings we give to links on individual social sites.
The content linked to includes
news page stories about new research studies and initiatives are quite common. While heavily shared links included software simulations, web cam images, jokes and podcasts.
The league table is as follows:
Social visibility of Russell Group universities
University of Cambridge. Visibility score: 462,823
University of Oxford: 442,758
London School of Economics: 286,859
Newcastle University: 186,184
University College London: 176,202
University of Warwick: 169,462
University of Manchester: 143,186
University of Edinburgh: 131,053
Queens University Belfast: 118,137
University of Glasgow: 72,211
University of Bristol: 70,656
University of Nottingham: 64,381
University of Leeds: 63,802
Imperial College London: 47,321
Cardiff University: 46,053
University of Southampton: 44,106
King’s College London: 31,762
University of Liverpool: 20,444
University of Birmingham: 15,873
University of Sheffield: 9,912
It’s a bit crude but nevertheless fascinating. And it is quite striking how big the gap is between Oxbridge and the lower half of the table. Many of us have a lot to do to catch up.
This doesn’t REALLY have much use for universities though as it’s not the size of the visability, but what you do with it that really counts.