Survey: Harvard ranks second in social media use

By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff

Oklahoma and LSU may be the best teams in college football according to the latest Associated Press poll, but Johns Hopkins, Facebook’s birthplace Harvard, and Notre Dame are the top schools for social media.

So claims StudentAdvisor.com, a Cambridge-based unit of a Washington Post Co. subsidiary that seeks to provide comparative information about colleges to potential students, students, and parents. Information on the site is free to students, parents, and guidance counselors. The thinking is that at some point that site will gather data that colleges and universities would be willing to pay for, StudentAdvisor.com editor-in-chief Dean Tsouvalas said.

In compiling its survey, StudentAdvisor.com monitored more than 2,000 schools that use such social media as Facebook and Twitter, he said. How many tweets does a school send from its official Twitter accounts in a day? How quickly does a school respond to a student request made on the school’s official Facebook page? Those are some of the activities that StudentAdvisor.com examined in devising its latest rankings. The size of a school is also taken into account, Tsouvalas said.

Not long ago, a school’s use of social media was mostly about fun and organizing flash mobs. But now it has evolved to become “an essential component of college life today,” he added.

A StudentAdvisor.com press release noted that Tufts University routinely tweets information about dining hall lunch menus, and at LSU, tweets note in real time which of the school’s 23,000 parking spaces are available. At the Thunderbird School of Management, a GPS app can be used for tracking down alumni.

Some other schools that made StudentAdvisor.com’s top 10 for social media colleges: Ohio State, Columbia, the University of Kentucky, and Stanford. To see the list, please click here.