Social-Media Use Grows at Colleges, Despite Little Dedicated Staff

By Lee Gardner. Colleges may still be unsettled by the prospect of MOOCs, but they are increasingly comfortable with another Web-based game-changer: social media. On Thursday the Council for Advancement and Support of Education released its latest annual survey of social-media use by colleges, with more than 1,000 institutions responding. (The full results are here.) Colleges may be more social-media savvy, perhaps even social-media dependent, but at most colleges it’s still something employees do on the side. Not surprisingly, the two most popular social media used by colleges over all remain Facebook (used by 96 percent) and Twitter (82 percent). The use of the photo-sharing site Flickr has declined, from 51 percent in 2012 to 38 percent this year. While colleges have begun to use newer (and younger-skewing) social media such as Instagram and Tumblr, which were not included in the CASE survey last year, the percentage that do so remains relatively modest: 27 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Read more...