I maintain a nice list of the 256 highest-ranked public and private universities in the United States (according to U.S. News & World Reports). Every so often I dive through all 256 to look for trends and collect data.

One of the more notable content trends over the last few years is the rise of social web callouts. A social web callout is a box or content region that highlights links to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

BlueFuego did some related research on this topic in 2009 and found that 40% of schools had a social web callout on their sites.

A few months have past. What’s changed?

It’s hard to do a direct comparison to BlueFuego’s data (they did not advertise their exact methodology),
but in my May 2010 study:

• 48% of schools had a social media callout on their homepage.

From this group:

• 90% had a link to the school’s Facebook page.
• 87% had a link to the school’s Twitter page.
• 77% had a link to the school’s YouTube page.

There were also many links to Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, and iTunesU, but exact data on these was not collected. By far, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were the dominant social media links.

One thing I expected to see, but did not, is content from social media sites placed at the very top level. Many universities have created social media portals to pull in Facebook updates, tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, etc., but they are not doing this on their main homepage. More on this topic in a future post.