University of Chicago Law School: The Electronic Projects Blog

Who @UChicagoLaw Follows, and Why

You might have noticed that the Law School's main twitter account has a lot of Twitter followers (nearly 5000 as of this writing), and also follows a lot of people. But we don't follow everyone who follows us. Why not? Because we feel that Twitter is as much about listening as it is about broadcasting, and we want to be able to hear what the people who are interested in our content are saying and to be able to converse with them when appropriate. To do that, we need to be able to slow down the firehose and filter out the signal from the noise. While we have no hard-and-fast rules and each decision is made individually, below are some of the things we consider when we decide whether or not to follow someone back.

In general, we will follow you if:

• You appear to be a real person. Hint: a photo and a bio go a long way toward establishing that fact.
• We know you are a student or an alum.
• Your feed consists of more than links to other people's content. We are especially excited to see you in conversation with other users.
• You are following us because you are interested in our content. If your feed provides evidence that you are engaged in the sorts of issues we tweet about, we'll be a lot more eager to add your stream to the river of tweets we encounter every day.

In general, we will not follow you if:

•  You are a spambot, or your account is used purely for the promotion of goods or services. We tend to see a lot of follows from law firms whose entire feeds consist of "So-and-so provides personal injury counsel in the area of Such-and-such County," over and over again. We do make an exception for other law schools and libraries, who usually provide links to quality content that may be of interest to our community.
• Your account is protected. We figure that if you don't want most people to see some of the stuff you're tweeting, you probably don't want us to see it.
• You have never actually tweeted. Not much point in us following you, then, is there?
• You tweet primarily in a language other than English. This is entirely our failing, rather than yours. We wish we had staff that could read the dozens of languages spoken by our followers, but alas, we do not. Tweets in languages we can't read could quickly begin to drown out those that we are capable of interacting with, and we would all be the worse for it.

What do you think of these lists? Do you have guidelines for which accounts you will or won't follow?

Tracking the Law School's Social Media

I recently spent some time immersed in Google Analytics, trying to track the effectiveness of some of the Law School's social media efforts. As these results may be of interest to colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, I thought I'd share the results here.

Goals

The goals of the Law School’s social media presence are:

1. to increase engagement between the Law School with both current students and alumni, thereby strengthening their bond with the school;
2. to increase engagement with prospective students, thereby increasing the chances that those students will choose to attend Chicago over one of our peer schools;
3. and to increase awareness in the general public about the achievements of the Law School’s faculty, students, and alumni.

The primary method for achieving these goals is to distribute content from the Law School’s website through a highly dispersed network of “followers” and “fans,” and to allow those followers to not only consume our content but to spread it to their own friends/followers.

Tracking Method

My measurement for tracking the effectiveness of this method is to trace the amount of traffic driven to our website by these social media channels, as a means of indicating consumption of the content contained therein. I did this by creating segments based on referring URLs and examining the content consumed by the different segments. Of course, visits and pageviews are not perfect indicators of content consumption, but they are the best option that I could figure out how to measure using Google Analytics. It should be noted that the numbers below are based on sampled data rather than absolute numbers.

Facebook

• The Law School currently has just over 2,000 fans on its Facebook page, an average of 450 of which are active on the page in a given month.
• Between 10/1/09 and 10/01/10, Facebook sent nearly 8500 visitors to the Law School website (this does not include the number that it sent to the Faculty Blog [just over 350] or the Becker-Posner Blog [just over 4,000]).
• Other than search engines and the University’s site, only Wikipedia and Leiter’s Law School Reports sent more visitors during that period.
• 27% of visitors from Facebook had never before visited the Law School’s site. This means two things:
  • 1) over 2200 people who had never visited the Law School’s site before were brought there by Facebook, and
  • 2) the remaining 6300 visits were from people who engage with the Law School repeatedly. Over 500 of the pageviews from those visits
• 18,728 pageviews resulted from Facebook
  • 17% were views of the home page
  • 16% were views of “student” pages
  • 7% were views of “news” pages
  • 7% were views of “prospective” pages
  • 3% were views of “alumni” pages  
  • 2% were views of audio/video pages

Twitter

• During the same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, Twitter.com sent nearly 5,000 visitors to the Law School’s website; however, because of the many different ways people can access Twitter (third-party applications, etc.), it is likely that the actual minimum number sent from the Twitter platform is closer to 6,000, and the total could be as high as 10,000.
• The Law School currently has over 3,500 followers on its primary account.
• 19,013 pageviews resulted from Twitter.com
  • 22% were views of the homepage
  • 8% were views of “student” pages
  • 4% were views of “news” pages
  • 33% were views of “prospective” pages
  • 2% were views of “alumni” pages
  • 1% were views of audio/video pages

LinkedIn

• During that same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, while only 492 visitors came from our LinkedIn group, 40% of those were new visitors. This is important because we know that the vast majority of our interactions with LinkedIn users tend to be with alumni, so this stat potentially indicates that alumni who are not otherwise visiting the Law School’s site are engaging with the Law School there.
• There are currently just over 1,300 members of our LinkedIn group.
• 1,552 pageviews resulted from LinkedIn
  • 18% were views of the homepage
  • 6% were views of “student” pages
  • 18% were views of “news” pages
  • 4% were views of “prospective” pages
  • 4% were views of “alumni” pages
  • 4% were views of audio/video pages

The biggest surprise for me out of all of these results was the large percentage of "prospective" pageviews generated by Twitter; I really had no idea whether our Twitter feed was reaching prospective students or not, but it appears that they are indeed our largest and/or most engaged audience on Twitter.

So, what do you make of these numbers, and how do they compare to your own? Suggestions for ways to improve both the accuracy of these results and the effectiveness of our social media efforts are, of course, more than welcome.

Update: One stat that I forgot to mention: all of those pageviews generated by our social media were equal to just 1% of our total pageviews for that time period, which seemed surprisingly low to me. However, visitors referred by social media spent approximately 33% more time per page than the average time per page, which indicates that while social media may not be driving massive amounts of traffic, it is driving people who are more likely to actually engage with our content.

Curl Up With UChicagoLaw on Goodreads

If there's one thing that a community as intellectually and politically diverse as UChicagoLaw can agree on, it's probably a deep and abiding love of books. So the Law School is proud to announce the launch of its official presence on Goodreads, the social network for people who love to read. Become our friend on Goodreads, and you can stay up to date with our faculty's new publications, get recommendations from the faculty, or catch up on some Law School classics. You can even become a "fan" of your favorite faculty members. As time goes on, we hope to use the site to organize discussions with UChicago authors, alumni book clubs, and more.

Have suggestions about how the UChicagoLaw community might use Goodreads? Leave a comment to let us know.

Tweet Home Chicago

The Law School is happy to announce the launch of a new experiment that we're calling TweetChicago. We've asked a few of our students and faculty to join the micro-blogging service Twitter and provide occasional updates on their lives in no more than 140 characters. By answering the question, "What are you doing right now?" our Tweeters provide you with a continuously updated snapshot of daily life at Chicago Law. We'll be adding more Tweeters as the year continues, so keep an eye on the site.

Want to learn more about Twitter? Check out this recent article from the New York Times (the discussion of Twitter begins on the second page), read about it on Wikipedia, or watch the short video introduction embedded below.

Update: The Law School and Social Networks

Social networking sites appear to be all the rage among Law School students past and current, who are using these sites to keep in touch with each other and to remain plugged in to life at the Law School. Since its launch in early January, the Law School's Facebook page has garnered nearly 450 "fans" ranging from alumni to prospective students. The Law School group on professional networking site LinkedIn has proven even more popular, with over 200 new members since late February. Thanks for making these efforts such a great success!

Speaking of Social Networking...

The Law School has established a group for students, alumni, and current and former staff on LinkedIn, the "professional networking" site. If are already on LinkedIn and would like to join, you can send a request to join now. If you're not familiar with LinkedIn, you can find out more here.

Law Firms and Social Networking

Social network sites seem to be gaining a foothold in the legal community. Michelle Madsen writes in an article in Legal Week:

With the launch last week of DLA Piper's Facebook-style networking tool for its trainees, it looks as if the social networking buzz is slowly working its way into the legal world. For the comparatively isolated in-house legal community, having easy online access to peers and external counsel alike could spell the beginning of an era of greater empowerment and integration, but how ready are they to log on and be counted?

Want to see what this social networking stuff is all about? Check out the Law School's Facebook page.

[Thanks to Lois Casaleggi from Career Services for the tip.]

Facebook Goes to Law School (and vice versa)

Back in November, we mentioned that the Law School was considering establishing a presence on Facebook, the social networking site. Shortly thereafter, Facebook launched its "Pages" program, allowing non-personal entities like organizations, political campaigns, and companies to create virtual homes on the site. The Law School has taken them up on this opportunity, and those of you with Facebook accounts can now "become a fan" of the Law School, just as you might with your favorite musician (though, as we all know, the Law School is a much better dancer). Just go to the page and click on "become a fan," and we'll start showing up in your News Feed.

We're still experimenting with how to use the page, but so far we've been using it to post blog entries, videos, and events. We've also compiled a list of related Facebook groups for individual class years and LSA-approved student organizations (please feel free to let us know if we've missed any). And if you have any suggestions for innovative ways to use the page, please post a comment below!

In Your Face(book)

One of the ideas we've been kicking around here in the Communications department is establishing a presence for the Law School on Facebook. As you may have heard, institutions of higher education have recently begun taking the plunge into using social networking sites, mostly as an admissions tool.  With over 42 million registered users (according to Wikipedia) it certainly seems as though Facebook is here to stay, and that universities ignore it at their peril.

Why might we want to dip our toes into the social networking waters, and what might it look like if we did?

1) Quite a few of our students are already on Facebook. There are about half a dozen Chicago Law School-related groups there, and an informal survey of our students indicates that many of them log into their accounts at least several times per week. A Law School Facebook presence could thus be a way to facilitate communication between the Law School and our current students, and between the students themselves. For example, it would be an easy way to get the word out about upcoming events.

2) It would provide a means for prospective students to "meet" current students and get a taste of the Chicago Law experience.

3) It's another way to distribute some of the great content we produce via the Faculty Blog and Podcast and get the word out about the fascinating work our faculty is doing.

4) It would allow  students (and the School itself) to keep in touch even after graduation.

The model that would seem to work best for these goals would be to establish a Facebook "group" for the entire Law School. It could tie together the various smaller groups (for individual classes, etc.) that currently exist and make it easier for students, prospective students, and alums to connect with each other. It would not reinvent the wheel, but rather be a means of supplementing already existing means of communication. And of course, it would be completely voluntary -- students could decide on their own whether to join the group or not.

So -- what do you think? Is this something that the Law School should pursue?