There is an interesting article on Mashable entitled “How Digitally Connected Are the U.S. News Top 20 Colleges?”. They have taken a list of top colleges produced in the normal ranking manner (costs, class size, retention etc) and given their own twist by calculating the following, for the colleges’ main accounts:

• Twitter followers
• Facebook fans
• YouTube videos/subscribers

So how would the University of Reading square up on these statistics?

• Our main Twitter account is UniRdg_News with 1,697 followers.
• Our main Facebook Page has 5,348 fans
• There are a number of University of Reading You Tube videos the main channel belongs to the university’s press office: UniofReading, with 37 uploads and 60 subscribers.

These results are on a par with the colleges listed, what I don’t know is the relative sizes of the institutions listed, so its hard to judge the comparability.

I do feel these figures aren’t actually measuring “connectiveness” as they show the universities are trying, but we don’t actually know if people are actually really noticing what is pushed out.