Stats update for April 2013 for Leeds City College

Stats update for April 2013 for Leeds City College

Facebook 5276 Likes
Twitter 2926 Followers
Youtube 25,961 Video Views
Flickr 65,525 all time photo views
Google+ 109 followers
Instagram 32 followers

BT Infinity 3 Months on

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Back in January BT Infinity finally launched it's long awaited Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC) service in my area, a service which I has been looking forward to for a while.  Whilst I was an O2 Broadband customer with speeds of 4mb/s I jumped at the chance of having internet speeds of up to 76mb.

3 Months on and the service is still going strong, I've restarted my router once since launch day (amazing) and the speeds are consistently high (superb). The highest speed I've seen is 74mb/s and lowest of 40mb/s

iPhone apps now download lightning fast, I can now watch BBC iPlayer in HD without it skipping, Youtube is now instant in HD and I get constant download speeds of around 3mb/s.

Was it worth it? in a nutshell... Yes!

Will the snow ever end?

 

On Friday 22nd March we had an unprecedented amount of snowfall in the Yorkshire area, the news have dubbed this month as the coldest in 50 years!

As usual our staff and students flocked to the Leeds City College website and Facebook page to find out the latest news.

On a normal day the Leeds City College website gets around 3000 hits, on Friday 22bnd March we received over 12,000! with 590 Hits on the Weather Update Post alone.

Although some staff struggled to get into college, they we're checking their emails from external devices as the web mail page on the website had over 750 hits Our Facebook page also saw a huge spike in traffic with our snow posts getting over 7400 views and it also helps us to promote the college.

R.I.P. Google Reader

Google reader has been one of those web tools which I've always taken for granted. It's so integrated into my daily life with keeping up to date with news that I was shocked to hear that Google are killing the service on 1st July as part of their Spring Clean, presumably to concentrate on their less successful applications such as Google+

As I've been using Reader since it was 1st launched back in 2005 and I had to find a replacement which had some of the features of the Google service.

Hello Feedly

As I like keeping up to date with popular and new iOS apps I had already downloaded Feedly a few weeks before Google's announcement but I initially found it to be less intuitive then my current iOS Google Reader app called Reeder

Reeder has been great, it's simple and intuitive to use and easily integrates with Google Reader so making the switch to Feedly wasn't going to be easy (until I had no choice!)

As Google had left me with no choice I persisted Feedly and I now enjoy using it, yep it's totally different to the Reeder app and an added bonus is that the Feedly Firefox plugin is very similar to the web Google Reader interface with even going to the extent of keeping the same keyboard shortcuts (j + k) brill!

Once Google switches off Reader on 1st and Feedly takes over, everything should carry on working as normal (hopefully).

I've even started to use Feedly now even though Google Reader is still active, I guess there's no point in waiting for the inevitable.

So in short,
If you use Google reader as much as I do then I would wouldn't hang around and make the switch to Feedly now.

Feedly website

Stats update for February 2013 for Leeds City College

Stats update for February 2013 for Leeds City College

Facebook 5166 Likes
Twitter 2742 Followers
Youtube 24,365 Video Views
Flickr 62,662 all time photo views
Google+ 81 followers
Instagram 33 followers

Leeds City College Facebook Page

Over the weekend the Leeds City College Facebook page has passed over 5000 likes, a huge milestone for us.  When I started as the Social Media Developer last September we had 4256 likes and this number has increased significantly recently partly due to to the snow.

Here's to the next 5000!

There's no business like snow business

Monday 21st January 2013 has been chaos for Yorkshire, over 10 inches of snow fell over night.  As most of Yorkshire ground to a halt, cyberspace was booming more than usual.

On an average Monday, the Leeds City College website usually gets around 3000 visits for the entire day, on the 21st we had just over 13000 hits! with over 300 realtime active users.  most of the traffic was in the early hours of the day as staff and students wanted to know if the college was open.

It was great to watch the live stats on the site which adds the emphasis how important Real-time Analytics are to us.

The Snow hasn't just had an impact on our website analytics but our social profiles too.  Our facebook page has seen an increase of 300 new likes over the past week with 200 new followers on twitter.

Leeds City College Blogs

 

After much tweeting and fiddling the Leeds City College blogs are now live. so far we currently have the Marketing blog but there will be many more to follow. leave a comment and let us know what your think.

January Leeds City College Stats

Another Stats update for January 2013 for Leeds City College

Facebook 4774 Likes
Twitter 2322 Followers
Youtube 26,045 Video Views
Flickr 57,940 all time photo views
Google+ 66 followers
Instagram 30 followers

as my previous post, I've decided to no longer support Pinterest for Leeds City College.

Time to deactivate Pinterest

Pinterest for Leeds City College has been used for a about a year now, even before I started this role.  I think it's the right time to deactivate the account as I feel that's we're not really gaining much from it at the moment, not to say that this won't change in the future.

Pinterest make it very easy to deactivate your account, maybe a bit too easy with a huge deactivate button on the settings page, it's almost as if Pinterest want you to deactivate your account.
 

 

During the deactivation process they inform you that all your pins will be removed and that your username not not be freed up.  This has it's good and bad points.

It means that cyber-squatters can't hog your username but it also means that I won't be able to re-register the same username in the future.

after taking this into consideration, I've decided to keep the Pinterest account active but remove any corrospondance to the fact we use pinterest from our website

Pinterest may still be useful to us in the future, maybe for our cookery or hairdressing courses, but I guess that's something we'll have to wait and see.