My eyes are swimming after going through more than 400 college and university Facebook Pages, and exactly 200 school-related groups as well. The direct result is a pile of useful links for SkoolPool's student users, who may be interested in related groups and pages as well as a school's official website. The following observations are a "side effect" of the last 2 days I spent with these groups...

Back in January, we went through all of Facebook hunting for higher ed related Facebook pages - and we came up with 420. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should be fairly representative of exactly how many Facebook Pages affiliated with a college or university there were as of January 24, 2008. There were more on top of this related to providing general higher ed information or application tips, but the 420 we are counting are all the pages that either include College or University in their name, and then weeded through to find any that were not related to an individual school, or school library, department, program, bookstore etc.

One downside of Facebook Pages is that it is so far impossible to see who the author is, or even contact them privately. The wall and discussion board are your only options, other than additional applications that the school may have added (such as SkoolPool's Contact Us application, hint hint). Because we can't see the author it is hard to tell how many of these pages are official and how many are started by students or supporters informally.

Quick stats:

• 307 were general school landing pages
• 62 were related to sub-communities within a school (such as specific programs)
• 22 represented a school's libraries
• 12 were student unions
• 8 were branch or satellite campuses
• 5 were campus bookstores
• 4 were alumni

73% of the 420 higher ed Facebook pages were general landing pages for the entire school. 14% were connected to sub-groups within the school community. 5% were for libraries and 2% were student unions. We could be doing a lot more!

Above: The University of Victoria's Facebook Page

The 307 general landing pages are headed in the right direction. This allows anyone and everyone to plaster the school name and logo on their own personal profiles to show their support of the school. But then what? I'm hoping to see more sub-communities emerge. Schools do not necessarily have to do all the work either. Pop onto Facebook and search for your school name, short form and team name - and just see what you get. MTV did a quick search for their hit show "The Hills" and found a group with more than 15,000 members! So they shot the group owner a note asking if they could link to each other, and of course the fan was more than willing to have direct contact with the show itself! MTV ended up getting a link to 15,000 fans, a great new intern, and a new strategy of searching for show related groups and forging relationships with group owners.

Above: St. Lawrence College's Facebook Page (Competitive Advantage SkoolPool package adds Recent News, Departments, Contact Information, About Us, Tagline and Important Dates to this page)

Whether or not you choose to start up Facebook Pages or Groups for your school's programs, clubs or services, it is a good idea to see what Facebook users are creating on their own. More than likely there are at least one or two groups or pages related to your institution that it might be wise to join - even just so that you can keep an eye on the dialogue.

PS. The Canadian Perspective