Campus News

UK Ranked 11th Best Facebook Account

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 25, 2011)  The University of Kentucky is one of the schools leading the pack when it comes to using social media to engage with students and supporters, according to an independent national study.

The Web Strategy Research's 2011 University Social Media Report ranked UK 43rd in the overall national ranking among 270 national universities, including more than 100 univeristies with a student population of 20,000 or more.

More specifically, UK ranked 11th on Facebook, 35th on Twitter and 141st on YouTube. The official YouTube account is the social media channel where the university’s efforts are newest in terms of establishing a formal site.

The 70-page report measures and ranks social media activity levels of university maintained social media. The report looked at more than 270 American universities and their social media activity levels on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes U, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare.

"Social media is a great way to communicate and build relationships with our growing and varied audiences at the University of Kentucky," said Tom Harris, UK's vice president for university relations. "We hope to engage our students, faculty, staff, alumni and fans through these online applications even more in the future."

The report is designed to help universities see how they rank in social media activity in comparison to other competing institutions, as well as to allow universities to see which areas they are leaders and in which areas of social media they are lagging behind. It also enables universities to monitor whether they are using the right mix of social media and emulate other universities' social media practices.

"This study was seen as primarily a 'benchmarking' exercise to allow schools to gauge their level of social media activity against other schools -- in a sense, to define the lay of the land," said Randy Miller, president of Web Strategy Research. "We used as our starting point publicly-available information that appears on each university's social media sites, then ranked and compared universities in several different ways...overall, by channel, by conference, and by student body size."

While the largest universities were shown to have the most social media activity, many smaller and elite academic universities secured their places among the top as well. The top 10 universities in social media activity were Harvard University, Stanford University, Auburn University, Texas Tech University, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Arizona State University, Purdue University, Kansas University, West Virginia University, and University of California Berkeley.

To connect with UK online, visit the following social media outlets:

 
MEDIA CONTACT: Julie Meador (859) 323-6363 ext. 256 or Julie.Meador@uky.edu