UCT climbs social media rankings

The World 100 Reputation Network’s Twitter Engagement report has ranked the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 57th position out of 253 universities across 35 countries globally, and first in Africa, for their social media work on Twitter.

UCT’s social media unit, based in the Communication and Marketing Department (CMD), managed a total of 1 140 tweets, compared with a global average of 464, and 520 replies (46%), compared with a global average of 9%. The team’s dedicated work pushed them ahead 11 places when compared with the previous ranking.

Gerda Kruger, the executive director of CMD, said, “We are extremely proud of the work done by the social media team, and we welcome the well-deserved recognition that this improved ranking brings. Social media is an increasingly important field of communication, particularly among the student community, and I look forward to seeing what the team can do as we grow our expertise in this area.”

The World 100 Reputation Network is the only professional network for reputation managers in the world’s best universities, exploring reputation, communications, strategy, crisis, marketing and international partnerships. Their Twitter Engagement ranking is based on the percentage of tweets retweeted, the volume of achieved retweets, the percentage of tweets favourited, and the volume of achieved favourites.

The top three universities in the ranking were Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University.