Monitoring a Social Platform from the Outside

Our main assignment for this week has been to simulate social media monitoring in regards to the Ohio Northern University Facebook page. At first, this was a pretty daunting task to approach. Having never done anything like this before I had to figure out where to start in order to efficiently evaluate the content and their engagement levels. I started by evaluating how many likes the page has received and going over their posts to see how many shares/likes/comments they tend to get on a typical post. 

After some general evaluation of the page, I was able to come up with some conclusions. I noticed that comments and likes tend to come from parents and alumni, while shares are often done by students. Videos perform much better than still photos and they have recently begun sharing more videos on their page to grab viewers attention. I also compared Northern's performance to that of the University of Findlay (UF). While UF has more followers and likes, their engagement is very similar if not lower than ONU. They don't show much of their student life activities, and had no videos posted to the page. It was an interesting observation, but definitely strengthened my thoughts that ONU has benefitted from their focus on students and use of video content on the platform.

Overall, this assignment definitely came with a learning curve. It took me a bit to really figure out what I was doing and how to interpret different things but eventually I figured it out! It truly is a very informative way of evaluating social performance, and I hope that ONU Communications and Marketing continues to grow!