While more and more professionals have started to rely on their personal Twitter accounts in their daily jobs, many have also created official accounts for their institution. In July 2008, Rachel Reuben, director of web communication and strategic projects at the State University of New York at New Paltz, surveyed her peers online about the use of social media in institutions of higher education. Among the 148 responses, 33 percent indicated that their institution had an official Twitter account, managed by the marketing and communication department in half the cases and updated on average between 1 to 4 times per week.
But what are these higher ed users doing with their official Twitter account? “Fifty percent use it to communicate with current students, and the other half uses it to reach out to alumni,” reports Reuben in the paper she wrote about the survey, “The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education."
ENGAGING TWEETS?
A quick review of institutional Twitter accounts reveals that most post news and don’t try to engage their follower base in this two-way communication platform.
Mike Richwalsky, assistant director for public affairs at Allegheny College (Pa.), created the official Twitter account for his college in May 2007 to republish news available on the website as well as via several RSS feeds. In February 2008, Richwalsky automated the whole process using Twitterfeed, a free service that will post to a Twitter account any update detected by the service at a specified RSS feed.
Allegheny College’s account had been updated a total of more than 610 times but only counted 159 followers in mid-December 2008. At the same time, the personal account I set up in August 2007 and started to use regularly a year ago had 282 followers as of mid-December.
This alone probably says something about the capacity of Twitter to reach members of any campus community.
Allegheny College’s follower base on Twitter is actually comparable to that of most institutions. In September 2008, Colgate University (N.Y.) made a bold move by featuring the updates of its official student Twitterer, Ajay Chahar of the class of 2012, on its website homepage, on the bottom left corner. By the end of the first day, Chahar had 10 followers. A month after his first Tweet, that number was up to 43, including several Twitterers working at other institutions or media outlets.
“Twitter has not hit critical mass with the demographic I am targeting,” says Brad J. Ward, electronic communication coordinator for admissions at Butler University (Ind.). When he surveyed the incoming freshman class last summer, he had a clear confirmation of the poor penetration rate of Twitter among college-age students: out of the 340 incoming freshmen responding, only 31 had heard of Twitter before and two were using it.
That’s the main reason Ward decided in May 2008 to start using Twitter—behind the scenes—to enable Butler student bloggers to provide quick updates about their whereabouts between longer posts on their admissions-sponsored blogs. Twitter acts like a simple back-end messenger displaying on the blogs the short updates that the bloggers sent via a regular text message using their cell phones.
Wayne State University (Mich.) has taken an original stand on Twitter. Instead of using the platform to communicate with potential followers, the Web Communication department has decided to use it as a customer service tool to listen, address, and reply to any problems reported via Twitter.
After the creation of Wayne State’s official account, any mentions of variations of the institution’s name were tracked and their authors “followed” in the Twitter sense of the term. “Students started talking more about Wayne State both positive and negative. We made it a point to respond to everyone, figure out what they are having issues with, and offer our help,” wrote Nick DeNardis in a post published in early September 2008 on the Wayne State Web Communication blog.
Only time will tell if Twitter can become an effective communication channel with students. However, the best way to find out if it can help you communicate with your peers is to set up your free account and get started.
Karine Joly is the web editor behind www.collegewebeditor.com, a blog about higher ed web marketing, public relations, and technologies. She is also a web editor for an East Coast liberal arts college and a consultant on web projects for other institutions.
