Penn State trails only the University of Michigan in the race for the most Facebook fans, as the social media tool becomes increasingly important in student-university communications.
Last June, Penn State launched its own Facebook page as a way to communicate with students, alumni, employees and fans.
Penn State's Facebook page has more than 76,000 fans -- only a few shy of being the largest following among official university pages for Big Ten schools, Penn State spokesman Geoff Rushton said.
"Social media in general has become very important to communications, and Facebook is obviously the biggest player in social media," he said.
Since its start, Penn State's Facebook page has been used to alert students of school closings, charity events and sporting event scores. In September -- in the midst of the police search for Joe Dado -- Facebook became a major tool for students to communicate and share information both before and after the freshman was found, Rushton said.
"That was the first time we used Facebook in that way obviously, and it served two major purposes. First, it took some of the burden off the Live site, which was experiencing a huge amount of traffic," Rushton said. "But it also let us interact with people, and that is what is most valuable about having a Penn State page on Facebook."
Many students found out about Dado through Facebook group invites sent out long before official news was released.
"If I didn't find out over Facebook, I probably wouldn't have heard until the next day in the paper, and it would have been after the fact," Ilsa Snyder (freshman-international relations) said.
But the university's page is not the only way Penn State students can get news: Professors and staff members have also taken to using Facebook to communicate with students.
During a scheduling snafu in September, Christian Brady, dean of the Schreyer Honors College, alerted students of the glitch using his Facebook page. Brady said because many of his students are his "friends," he uses his page to reach them.
"From the perspective of a dean I will use my Facebook status updates and notes to inform students of exciting things going on the college, recruitment announcements, deadlines and other things that I think will be of interest to them," he said.
Rushton said he thinks Penn State's Facebook page is important in case of emergencies -- the page's status is automatically reset to post any message sent out over PSUTXT, the emergency text messaging system.
