The University of Tartu’s social media hub allows to follow the university’s events via its posts in social media.
Created on the example of US universities MIT, Hamilton and Harvard, the environment currently brings together around 100 social media accounts linked to the university.
“By implementing a social media hub we make information more compact and accessible to some very important target groups of the university – current and future students and the university’s collective who use social media on daily basis and follow our news through these channels,” said Illari Lään, the Head of the UT’s Communication Unit. According to him, an estimated 100,000 users currently follow the university’s social media accounts.
The social media hub, allegedly unique in the European context, represents UT’s versatility through its Estonian, Russian and English language accounts. According to the university’s communication specialist, Inga Külmoja, the new web environment reflects on the ongoing events in the university as a uniform whole. “While some Facebook account posts reach the users’ information feeds selectively, the information will not be lost in the university’s social media hub. The hub also features a search that helps find UT’s social media accounts of interest and to follow them.”
“The posts from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs will be displayed as a uniform information feed in the hub. About one half of the pages linked to the hub are the Facebook pages of different university units and programmes,” Külmoja explained.
The social media hub is constantly renewed. All users are welcome to add any known social media accounts related to the university via the web form. Among other things, the social media hub allows to highlight the content created by users. For example, the English-language page of the hub currently highlights the freshest Instagram photos tagged with #unitartu. Similarly, it is possible, for example, to highlight the tweets made by people in the University of Tartu in Twitter or tweets related to a certain conference on the basis of a given hashtag.
