An increasing number of campus organizations are beginning to use social media tools to disseminate information to faculty, staff, students and even prospective students.

This is driven by the popularity of these Web sites, and the frequent use by students, faculty and staff. Currently, Facebook has a network of more than 320 million users and 10 million fan pages, while Twitter has grown from roughly a million users in 2008 to nearly 25 million at the beginning of 2010 in just the United States.

These Web sites have opened up new communication channels for St. Edward’s University to interact with its students, staff, faculty and alumni.

“We have been working with a variety of social media tactics; we have Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube,” said Marcie Lasseigne, public relations associate of the Marketing Department. “We have just been giving everyone as many mediums to communicate as possible, because everyone likes to communicate differently.”

The St. Edward’s Marketing Department has also begun using Facebook, Twitter and Flickr in hopes of connecting with students and alumni for the 125th anniversary of the university.

“Our 125th anniversary Web site will be an aggregator of all of these social medias,” said Lasseigne. “You can find all of our pages very easily and link from there and post images on Flickr or videos on YouTube.”

Lasseigne also said the department began a Facebook fan page at the end of the past fall semester in hopes of reaching out to more people.

“Facebook has been the most successful, with our page now having over 1,400 fans,” said Lasseigne.

One of the key features of these outlets is the ability to connect organizations that, up to that time, may not have been able to network. The Marketing Department has also been using these mediums to increase the university’s prominence in the Austin community.

“For Twitter, we have been following a lot of local new media [pages] to get our stories out, not the least of which is about our 125th anniversary,” Lasseigne said.

This has allowed members of the Marketing Department to share story ideas, offer sources and connect with local media outlets in ways that were previously unattainable.

Individual schools have also begun using Facebook and Twitter to connect with students and to let them know about key dates and events within their school.

“I post whenever faculty ask me to post,” said Adam Pyles, administrative coordinator for the School of Humanities. “Whether it be a Humanities event, or information about advising, I post whatever is relevant to our school’s students.”

Pyles also said he believes the ability to connect with students through Facebook has increased the awareness students have of what is going on in their school, though he admits that he really has no way of measuring how man students use the information. One problem that each group of new media users is running into is judging the effectiveness of each of these mediums.

“It’s often difficult to tell how effective we are in communicating with our students unless we get a direct post back,” said Pyles. “I do believe we are reaching more students than we would by just e-mailing them.”

 

[email protected]