Top Social Media College Rankings FAQsBy Dean Tsouvalas
Editor-In-Chief
StudentAdvisor.com
StudentAdvisor.com's Top Social Media Colleges ranking compares more than 6,000 federally recognized colleges and universities and post-secondary schools in the United States in terms of their mastery of public social media methods, tools and websites. The top 100 of those schools are shown in the ranking list, which is regularly updated.
The StudentAdvisor.com research team continuously collects information on how active and effective each school is at engaging their audiences on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media tools, such as iTunes and podcasts. The ranking methodology also takes into account the size of each school's population, as well as other metrics, to gauge overall reach and effectiveness. The team then produces a strictly quantitative score for each school based on this information, and updates the findings regularly.
Only those social media sites and tools that are available to the public are involved in the scoring methodology. Internal college tools or sites that are unavailable to prospective students or the public are not part of the scoring. In addition, we removed schools that we could not verify enrollment or were under 1,000 in enrollment.
Although we only publish the Top 100 schools, we are updating thousands of sites regularly and it's likely we know where your college ranks on the list beyond 100, as long as it meets the above criteria. Feel free to contact us at Top100 ‹ at › StudentAdvisor.com to inquire.
Data is collected on an ongoing basis and the list is published several times a year. The lastest list was published in Fall, 2011.
Numbers next to the arrows indicate how many ranking spots a school has moved up or down from the previous month's list. While thousands of schools are numerically ranked, StudentAdvisor only publishes the Top 100.
When a school is marked as a new entry it means it's the first time the school has ranked on the overall list after meeting the eligibility criteria.
When a school is marked as a re-entry it means it has returned to the Top 100 list, after falling off a previous version.
Only after the quantitative list is produced, the Student Advisor team then further delves into each colleges' social media presence to add the qualitative comments that appear as part of in the list.
Yes, the Top Social Media College ranking takes into account multiple social media accounts per school, if publicly available.
No. The research team has meticulously screened out non-school affiliated pages.
The Top Social Media Colleges ranking methodology factors in and normalizes the score based on the size of each college's enrollment, and only accounts for schools with an enrollment exceeding 1,000 students. The StudentAdvisor systems have been tracking the social media accounts for a time and are tuned to alert for sudden changes in any metrics that may warrant further analysis for efficacy.
Complete details of the HubSpot methodology are located here, and it includes among other things, the number of followers, the power of those followers, the number of Twitter updates, the recency of updates, the ratio of followers to those following, overall engagement and other calculations.
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