Social media at UniSA

On early Saturday afternoon (our time in South Australia) I got online and registered UniSA as a Facebook username. You may, or may not have, noticed that the Facebook URLs aren’t that friendly or easy to remember but Facebook changed that for pages/profiles over the weekend. Read more about it on Inside Facebook.

Now you can easily find the University of South Australia (UniSA for short) by typing www.facebook.com/unisa into your web browser.

We were able to do this as we have over 1000 fans but for pages without this many fans, you can claim your username in two weeks time. Individuals, however, can also claim a pretty URL right now.

Here’s an interesting article from a website called ‘Web Strategy by Jeremiah’ who writes about Social Networks Site Usage: Visitors, Members, Page Views, and Engagement by the Numbers in 2008.

Have a read of the article. It talks about the huge growth in Facebook – ‘… the 4th most-trafficked website in the world.’ The article also has a number of links off to other sites that talk about the growth of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc, and the membership of these sites.

Facebook is the most widely used social network within Australia according to a recent study, but if you’re trying to market internationally, then there are more popular ones. View the map within the article to find out what’s used where.

But, having established that Facebook is very widely used within Australia, it might not be the best marketing tool for attracting students to study here, or anywhere for that matter. At a recent AMA symposium by the Art and Science Group, the role of social networking was talked about for students’ college choice (it’s an American study but I’m sure it would apply here also).

Some of their conclusions were:

SNS not a primary or effective marketing/communications tool for prospective students

Direct marketing through SNS may be seen as an invasion of private space and become counter productive

We don’t use our UniSA Facebook page as a direct marketing tool for prospective students, but it is a place to share information about latest news etc and the fanbase is steadily growing.

In the last couple of years the terms ‘web 2.0′ and ’social media’ have been bandied about more and more. So what is social media?

First, let’s take a step back to the days before social media or web 2.0 when websites served up webpages and you as a reader arrived at them to view. That’s pretty much all you did. Then websites started to become places where you could leave comments, eg weblogs (blogs), Flickr, YouTube and Facebook to name just four. Now you could participate in the content that people were putting up and it became so much easier to add your own content and discuss it with others.  Hence, the term social media.

Ben Parr’s definition is:

Social Media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in more efficient ways.

There’s so many social media websites these days that it can be quite overwhelming. Here’s a diagram of a conversation prism from Brian Solis (click to view larger image):

There’s no way that you could participate in all of these, and you probably wouldn’t want to either, but if you want to get your feet wet with social media, why don’t you join some of them and have a look around?

If you want to keep it work related, then visit UniSA’s presence on social networks, have a look around, leave comments if you want (you may have to register to do so).

• UniSA’s Facebook page
• UniSA on Flickr
• UniSA on YouTube

What do you think? Leave a comment (link at top of this post) and let us know.