Dive Brief:
- Schools including Northern Illinois University have introduced policies requiring all official social media account to keep track of interactions, as well as if they are positive or negative, placing unwelcome burdens on some staff and departments.
- Lynne Thomas, a curator of rare books and special collections at Northern Illinois University Libraries, called the monthly analytics and report demands "onerous to the point of ludicrous," and ultimately opted to make her department's social media presence inactive.
- Schools are being motivated to monitor social media accounts more closely out of concern for institutional messaging and reputation.
Dive Insight:
Danielle L. Schultz, director of internal audit at NIU, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the university identified around 170 Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and YouTube channels that met its criteria for being university-related, and about 70% of them weren't being watched within the school's social media database. It's easy understand the concern that administrators have for how they campus is being represented. After all, Facebook and Twitter are platforms for public communications that reflect positively or poorly on the brands attached to them.
Still, in an industry of over-taxed faculty and staff who already have plenty of guidelines to meet, it would be a shame to see social media communications stifled as a result of to many analytics requirements. In the end, some institutions might be better served to assign a full-time analyst for assessing social media use on a campus-wide basis.
