In our last post, we showed how the ‘declining’ Facebook numbers of the college-aged can be explained by removing their school affiliations after graduation, (rather than an act of frustration now that Mom and Dad are friending them!). We thought it might be interesting to look at the actual Facebook usage on the biggest campuses in the country. We used Facebook Social Ads to crunch the numbers on the top 150 Universities and top 50 Community Colleges with the highest enrollment. Download the full data set here in XLS format.
There’s a striking difference between the average % of students on Facebook from a State/Private Universities verse Community Colleges.
Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com
Top 10 Campuses with the Highest Facebook Adoption: State/Private vs Community College
Source: Facebook’s Social Ads Platform & StateUniversity.com
Contact: DJ@istrategylabs.com
Key Insights:
1) There is a massive gap between Facebook adoption at State/Private Universities and at Community Colleges, even with similar enrollment numbers.
2) There are only 19 schools with over 50% of their students using Facebook
3) Even the school with the highest Facebook adoption (what’s up JMU!) ..is still coming in below 70%
Of course, there are reasons for these figures to be lower than expected. You don’t need a .edu email address to register a Facebook account anymore, so we could be missing a chunk of students. Additionally, Facebook is no longer requiring students to join a school network.
If Facebook’s Social Ads system is not correcting for this through IP targeting or some other method, marketers are not able to accurately target the college population. As an agency that focuses on youth marketing every day, it’s concerning that our industry/clients assume Facebook captures this entire population – it’ just not the case.
At best, we’re able to reach 2/3 of a college population on a campus like JMU. On average, as we’ve shown, you can only reach about 1/3!
Comments
It’s possible that Facebook (or now FaceFeed?) isn’t relevant on community college campuses. The original intent of the site was to bring people together across a campus. In a dispersed environment without a campus feel and without the same culture it simple isn’t necessary for students to be part of the site in order to have a social life and keep up.
I notice my own usage has plummeted since about 6 months after college for the same reason. Instead of focusing on FB for planning or ocmmunicating, I found it easier and better to email, call or text people to make plans. I still add people as friends on Facebook (though more sparingly) but I rarely log in to check what people are doing or use it as a communication tool.