About Divison I Social Media

The desire for comparison -- to know not just how you're doing, but how you're doing compared to the next guy -- is innate within us all.

In the world of education, however, easy comparisons aren't easy to come by. (Hence, our continued fascination with institutional rankings from various news organizations.) But here, in the world of social media, we're flooded with numbers: likes, follows, clicks, reach, retweets, repins... You get the idea.

Even still, it's not an easy task to compare ourselves across a wider spectrum. Tracking hundreds of other institutions' numbers (on top of our own) takes time, which can be at a premium in our 24/7/365 industry.

My name is Jeff Brown; I'm the director for social media communications at Baylor University, a large, private, Christian school in Waco, Texas. For some time, I've been doing the time-consuming work of compiling institutional numbers in order to see where Baylor stands in various social media platforms -- to be able to provide some context to my higher-ups, and to see who's doing it really well so that they can be studied for ideas.

It occurred to me that others might also appreciate the fruits of this labor, and so we have this blog. Here, you will find the most recent data I've got -- perhaps monthly, perhaps bimonthly -- on follower numbers for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest accounts across higher education.

A few notes about my methodology:

• With Facebook and Twitter, I am looking at official university accounts across the 350+ Division I colleges and universities. Generally, these are the single account linked off the front page of a school's website.
• For Instagram and Pinterest, I've both broadened and tightened that search. For each, I look at both university and athletic accounts, but only for the 120 or so Division I FBS (formerly Division I-A) schools, because of how much deeper I usually have to drill to even find such accounts on university websites. At this time, expanding the search to all of D-I would just be too time-consuming.
• The vast majority of the time, I am only considering accounts that I find either identified somewhere on the school's website as an official account or verified through the platform as official. Simply saying "This is the official [platform] account of XYZ University" is too easily faked.

If you've got any questions, please drop me a note. I hope you'll find the information here useful.