We may indeed be reaching a wider audience

I blogged a few weeks ago asking the question How do I know if Twitter and Facebook has helped us reach a wider audience? Well, I did a little survey to follow up the original one (in which I neglected to ask questions that would help me understand if we were reaching a wider audience through this channel because I didn't know that was a question I wanted an answer to at that stage!). My suspicion was that we were reaching a wider audience via Twitter and Facebook but I didn't have the data to back that up. My feeling has been that traditionally students have engaged with Student Development when they had a problem, e.g. needed help with an essay or advice on career options, and proactive promotion of our service has been (in my opinion) quite limited.

So here are the three simple questions I asked in the follow-up survey.

Are you a... (university of Leicester student, student from another university, etc.)?

• a campus based student at the University of Leicester - 27
• a distance learning student at the University of Leicester - 6
• a student from another university- 2
• a member of staff at the University of Leicester - 1
• a member of staff from another university - 0
• other - 0

Not a big response - but pretty good I thought from just a couple of tweets over 24 hours requesting people to fill it in.

Were you aware of Student Development services at the University of Leicester before following us on Facebook or Twitter?

38% of respondents or 14 out of 46 (yeah I know, not a big sample group...) only knew a bit or nothing about our services before following us on Facebook or Twitter.

Has your awareness of Student Development services improved since following us on Facebook or Twitter?

I've grouped these results according to how they responded to the previous question regarding whether they were aware of our services before following us on Facebook or Twitter.

So everyone is learning more about our services as a result of following us on Facebook or Twitter - even those who said that they were already aware of our services before following us. And with 38% of respondents only knowing a bit or nothing about our services prior to following us on Facebook or Twitter I think I can tentatively say that we are we are beginning to reach a wider audience.

Finally, here are some of the comments respondents made in the 'Anything else you'd like to tell us' box (all of which were positive):

I think that the facebook page is a great idea and i have since spread the word to mates and got them to join.

More university news should be published this way.

Before I joined the course, was not aware but now when it is finished at last found student development zone was  there what I really need, have done better if had known at the start of the course.

It's very pleasant to see that the University of Leicester does use modern media/ways of communication to interact with its students. This shows that the university is highly professional and experienced when it comes to communicating with people all around the world.

So I'm quite pleased with that :)

(Note to self: next time I think I'll do a survey using Google forms and use one of their clever gadgets to display the results in real time)

[PS. I've had to amend this post because the embedded, published Google spreadsheet charts weren't displaying in either Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 (but were fine in Chrome). Anyone else ever had that problem?]