Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
10 ways universities can (and should) use twitter
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on August 17th, 2009
My last post on twitter and higher ed got a lot of attention…it seems higher ed communicators are trying to figure out how twitter works, while at the same time wrestling with what kinds of information and content would be helpful and appropriate for their twitter audience.
I do think that in many cases twitter can be an incredibly powerful tool for universities, as long as it is used with a specific goal and purpose in mind. With that in mind, here are 10 ways I recommend universities can (and should) use twitter.
1. Connect with alumni
Find and follow alumni and track alums discussing the school online. Include a link to your twitter account in all alumni e-mail communication, put a link to it on your alumni site and your career center site, and encourage alums to follow school news and alumni events through twitter. You can even set up a separate twitter account specifically for alums so that they are getting targeted information, like daily tips for job seekers. If you have a large alumni event, be sure to post event updates prior via twitter, and pictures and other follow-up on twitter afterward. Interact directly with alums, invite them personally to events, and share in the follow-up conversation after alums get together.
2. Share achievements of students/faculty
Bring more to your twitter feed than your standard news feed. Call out interesting projects you know about on campus, recognize students for awards or achievements, announce a faculty member’s new research etc. Be sure to call out the person’s twitter name if they are on twitter, and link to any online examples of work if they have it. This will make your twitter account more interactive.
3. Promote campus events
Hosting a great guest speaker or a regional conference? One of your faculty presenting at a major event? Promote through twitter. Include links, tell readers how to get involved, and engage the community outside the walls of the campus by inviting the general public via twitter. You’ll build the reputation of your school in the local community and beyond by engaging more personally with these audiences and bringing them onto campus for an event they find educationally or professionally valuable.
4. Disseminate university news
Ok, don’t go crazy here. Think about what your twitter audience (alums, current students, community members, etc.) actually care about. Don’t use your twitter account for JUST news either. You can put out announcements of major news items, but your feed should be a diverse set of information, not a regurgitation of your News page.
5. Interact during campus events
Don’t just use twitter to publicize the fact that you’re having an event, use it to make the event itself more interactive. Invite students, faculty or staff to “live tweet” the event, posting quotes, observations, photos and video of the event as it happens. This will give those who could not attend a live feed of what is happening, give those who are attending a way to interact and discuss the event, and everyone else an opportunity to learn from speakers, feel involved and even see a record or what happened if they missed the event.
6. Connect with potential students and their parents
Use twitter to provide a channel through which prospective students and their parents can communicate directly and personally with the school. Offer access to admissions personnel once a week for live question and answer sessions, or post daily tips on selecting a school, writing admissions essays, doing campus visits, getting through the financial aid process, etc. You may find you’ll reach an even broader audience that just your applications, and that’s great. These efforts build awareness and connection with your school with audiences who become influencers when their friends and family begin looking at schools.
7. Connect department, students and faculty
You can use twitter to reach outside audiences. But you should also consider the power of using twitter internally. Twitter has been used in a number of cases to spur greater live classroom discussion, link related classes in different departments, allow professors to share ideas with their students, and build campus-wide communication.
8. Share live coverage of sporting events
For many schools, sports programs are a key link to alumni and community audiences. Get these groups more engaged through twitter. Live tweet sporting events, providing not only score updates but commentary and interaction with fans. Use a unique hashtag for your events so that attendees can also post pictures and commentary, and interact live with the fans during the game. Often out of town alums can’t get access to your school’s events, so providing a free way for them to follow the games online is a great way to build an engaging community.
9. Share career advice
Of course one of the best ways to keep alumni involved is to make their professional experience and integrated with their educational experience as possible. Alums who continue to view their alma maters as first-tier resources for job advice, job postings, networking connections etc. are far more likely to stay engaged with the school after graduation. And you can use twitter to build this engagement. Simplify access to career services through twitter. They should be available to answer questions, but should also be sharing constant advice, posting the latest job openings, and connecting proactively with alumni and local businesses. Offer weekly live sessions with a prominent alum or a local business person who can offer compelling advice to students. Track conversations about job searches and trends in hiring. Make the connection as valuable as possible, and alums will definitely keep coming back.
10. Get personal!
This is a broad statement, but is one that should be applied across any and all of the previous nine suggestions. Above anything else, your twitter feed should ring out as a unique PERSONAL voice for whatever department, school or office it is managed from. There is nothing worse than an auto-updating, auto-messaging, auto-feeding string of campus news announcements through the PR office. If you can’t get creative and personal, then don’t bother with twitter at all because you won’t get anything out of it. It’s the personal, one-on-one conversations that matter most in this medium, so don’t be afraid to lend some feeling and personality to your posts!
if teens don’t tweet… then why are universities on twitter?
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on August 6th, 2009
We’ve all heard the news… twitter is “in”. And universities and colleges are no exception to the mass of brands, users and organizations jumping on the 140-character bandwagon. In the last 6 months, there has been a massive uptake in university twitter use, w
ith admissions and marketing people leading the charge.
But a recent Nielson report on twitter reveals that the twitter population skews heavily in the direction of over-25-year-olds, with teens making up less than 16% of the twitterverse. While many argue this will change, and soon, and I do believe that it will, eventually, this fact still brings up a very important question.
Why are universities on twitter?
I ask this because as administrators, admissions personnel, marketing and PR people and alumni relations managers flock to twitter, they are ignoring other much larger populations of online interaction. The answer lies, in part, because these people understand twitter better than they understand other networks. Why? Because they all fall in the right demographic for twitter! We all would prefer to use tools and techniques we can relate to, understand and can use effectively. Broadly speaking, the university personnel to whom we refer fall directly in the target demographic for twitter use.
This is not to say that using twitter can’t be useful to colleges and universities. But I do think we need to do a better job of understanding the audience on twitter and catering communication effectively. For example, planning an alumni engagement strategy on twitter is a great direction to move in. Your target group is older, more likely to engage on twitter, and less likely to be consistently getting information about the school from other places.
Attempting to use twitter to grow enrollment? Probably not the best plan. Using twitter to reach currently enrolled students? Don’t count on major uptake in that area. Does that mean you’ll have to go back to using the old tools? Definitely not! Teens and early 20s adults are online constantly, usually in places like Facebook and MySpace, and are connecting with the community in ways that can be incredibly valuable for universities and colleges. We just have to build more strategy around how we communicate in different channels and understand where our target groups are interacting, not just which tool seems the best to us!
For more information, check out Mashable’s take on teens and twitter, they have some useful general info on what user groups are growing and interacting there today.
twitterpated? 5 steps to twitter maturity
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on April 27th, 2009
Clients, friends and family are catching the twitter bug. People I never imagined would be interested in twitter are finding unique uses for twitter across a wide range of interests. One uses twitter to track news, another to follow celebrity gossip, yet another to begin networking for career development, and another to drive blog traffic.
With twitter now serving as a news source, an RSS feed, a virtual networking event and a syndication forum, it’s important to note that because not everyone is using twitter in the same way, they don’t all need the same tools or to follow the same rules!
Most people see twitter as a place where you should want to be building an audience for yourself. But lately I’ve been met with a number of instances where the member is just using twitter to observe and gather info. They’re not there to be a leader.
This got me thinking. If twitter is going to become a ubiquitous tool serving many different purposes, then what are some pieces of advice we can give new members, no matter what their purpose? So here we go… five steps to understanding twitter no matter who you are:
1) The online interface for Twitter is not the best thing to use for twitter, apart from signing up for a new account. There are a lot of tools out there that will help you get more out of it. I recommend Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. They are pretty comparable, though I’ve recently switched to Seesmic because it has a bit more functionality. If you’re looking for something that will work for you now as a beginner and also work if you get more into it and need more bells and whistles, go with Seesmic! This is similar to downloading AIM to your desktop instead of having to sign in through the clunky online interface. What it allows:
- Automatic refresh. You don’t have to keep clicking refresh on your page.
- Pop-up alerts if someone contacts you.
- Search: search for news, celebs, like-minded individuals, specific brands or topics, anything you can think of. Keep the search bar in tweetdeck or Seesmic and it will auto-refresh. So you want to keep track of conversations mentioning your favorite movie coming out Friday? Just type it in and you’ll get all the updates in real-time!
- All the other functions of twitter. Follow people, see what they’re saying, reply to them, direct message them, etc. All without having to actually go to your twitter page through a browser.
2) So you’re all set with your desktop app and you want to check out what all these other twitter types are up to? Here’s where search becomes key. Use search to find people or brands that interest you. Like reading the NYTimes? Follow them on twitter for live updates. Think Ashton Kutcher is hilarious? He’s on twitter. Want to know about restaurant and entertainment deals in your local area? Search for your town/city name and follow people tweeting about your area, or search for local magazines, newspapers, restaurants and bars, many of them are joining twitter to send out info on special events. You’ll be surprised at how niche the information you can find on twitter can get. Get creative!
3) Now you’re starting to follow people, people you find interesting who send out useful information that you like to follow. What do you do when they start to follow you back? Or when others who you don’t know start to follow you?
Don’t panic, this is normal! This isn’t facebook, they don’t need to be your math partner from 8th grade to want to follow you. It’s not about being friends, it’s about content and topic. If someone comes across your profile and sees that you are from the same local area or work in the same industry, they may follow you because they feel you have like interests and that you may say something of value that they’ll find interesting. You don’t have to follow these people back, but you should at least take a look at their profiles. You may find some really interesting people! If you do, feel free to follow them back. If not, don’t worry, you can just let them keep following you and you don’t need to reciprocate.
This is, in fact, a good strategy to have if you are trying to build up a twitter following. In general you should keep the number of people you are following and the number who follow you back fairly even, unless you’re a celebrity. To do this while proactively following a lot of people when you first join, don’t follow everyone back, only those you find really interesting. This will even out your ratio.
4) Now you have followed people, and you’ve got all these people starting to follow you back. What should you say!? Even for those people who want to use twitter as a listening device, I can guarantee there will be times that you’ll want to jump into the conversation. Here are some tips on how to get started:
- Think of what might be interesting. And by that, we do not mean that you’re about to go walk your dog. Interesting tips, links to articles or blog posts, funny facts, quotes, news, pictures, videos. Any time you can share something with the community in link form, that is best. If it’s something you heard offline, include it, and try to say who or where you heard it. In general, you can try to stay within topics that interest you, and just talk about anything at all! You can also take queues from the people you follow, commenting on things they write and sharing info you see in twitter already. This will help you get ideas for your own posts. If you have a blog, be sure to post a link on twitter whenever you put up a new post!
- Shorten links: The point of this is that you can fit more info in your tweet if the link you’re trying to share isn’t so long. Using a service like bit.ly, is.gd or others is the best way. These are built into Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Simply click “add URL” paste in your link, select the shortening service you want, or just go with the default, and hit Shorten. It will add the link into your tweet automatically!
5) The last step to twitter maturity is understanding the language. This can seem kind of silly at times, but much of it has evolved because of the 140-character limit. Certain shortcuts have cropped up that are used often, so here’s a guide to the most popular:
- @nameofperson. This is used in replying to someone. It’s like saying “Hey Anya, that last blog post you wrote was great, I found it really interesting.” In twitter speak, a message like that would look like this: “@anyawoods Hey, that last blog post you wrote was great, I found it really interesting.” For an added bonus in this instance, make sure you re-share the link to the post you’re talking about so other people can check it out!
- RT: RT is shorthand for “ReTweet”. This shorthand is used when you saw some interesting tidbit and you want to repeat it because you thought it was great. When you’re using Tweetdeck or Seesmic you can select Retweet on a tweet you found interesting and it will set up the entire process for you. Manually, the ReTweet looks like this: “RT @person’snameyouareretweeting Message you are retweeting”
- OH: Means “Overheard”. Like you were on the bus and heard something hilarious and you tweet it, or you were at a conference and overheard someone say something particularly insightful.
- FTW: Means “For The Win”.
- HT: Means hashtag. Hashtags are used to create consistency when a lot of people start talking about the same topic. For example, lots of conferences create hashtags to when people start talking about it online, everyone is using the same code and the whole conversation can be tracked. Hashtags are also used to track larger conversations. For example, everyone is talking about the Swine Flu epidemic right now. The hashtag is #swineflu. Which means you could say literally anything to do with the Swine flu, and close your tweet with the #swineflu hashtag, and your comment would be collected with all other comments about the same topic. You can also search for hashtags so you can keep track of conversations on a particular topic. This is what a hashtag looks like in the conversation:
- #followfriday: A tradition wherein every Friday tweeters recommend people to follow. You’ll see this happening frequently, feel free to check out those who are recommended and recommend your own people as well.
There are of course lots more tips I can share on getting started with twitter, and I’m sure others have more ideas as well, so if you have something to add please add to the comments section! I’ll do a follow up to this post with more details down the line, but this is a great starting off point for anyone looking to start getting involved, for any reason, in the twitter community. Good luck! And if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!
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how to increase your twitter followers
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on January 28th, 2009
This is a quick and succinct post from Kevin Rose that gives some great tips on increasing your audience on twitter. Perfect to consider when starting a personal or company twitter account.
I particularly recommend getting involved in conversations and trending topics, especially if you’re at a large event or tradeshow in your industry. Great way to increase your audience with valuable followers.
new media summit – email marketing is alive and well
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 15th, 2008
Greg Cangialosi – Blue Sky Factory, Inc.
Richard Evans – Silverpop
Pamela O’Hara – BathBlue Software
Chip Terry – ZoomInfo
Is email dead? Is it still going strong?
Bulk email is ok, unsolicited email is ok. How do you define spam, and how close can a marketer get before crossing the line?
Chip- There needs to be a clear opt out, needs to come from a real email address, must not be sent again to someone who has opted out. But the question is, how do we look at standards that go beyond what’s legal? You have to be very careful. Is bulk email sending 500 emails to a targeted audience or sending 10 million emails to anyone you can get an address for?
Pam – Really, spam is in the mind of your customer, and is different for each person. You’re trying to build a relationship. You’ve got to slowly walk in, give people tons of opportunities to say back off, and it’s an ongoing definition you’ll have to build on with each individual.
What happens to te companies that people learn are definitely spammers?
Richard – When a customer engages in spamming people, we address that and first and foremost work with them to understand that what they’re doing is a violation of law and horrible biz practice. We don’t see it that often, but do terminate contracts with those that abuse the system.
Greg – We’ve set up our network to break out each sender and measure the reputation of that sender. We can find out how many are complaining or hitting spam button when those emails come in. We run a strict policy, and three strikes you’re out
Richard – Relevance is a term that keeps coming up here, and is key. When you think about email and how it’s related to new media in facebook and myspace, if it becomes irrelevant then it’s spam. If i log onto twitter and all i see is corporate ad-related tweets, that becomes spam. There is alot that has been learned in the email industry that can be carried over into other communities.
Chip – email marketing is part of a marketing mix. It’s not send an email and hoping you get a response, its being on facebook, myspace, linked in, sending a postcard, going to an event, engaging with customers. All of that combined. Email has the benefit of being highly trackable, but I think that trackability has led to overuse of the medium. Find the right list, have a compelling offer, and that’s most of it.
Pam – You can send email but also see if people are talking about your brand on other networks so integrating these mediums is important. If someone is complaining about your product or advertisement you can take them off the list or engage with them personally.
Email marketing as an acquisition tool?
Greg – There is a big difference between list rental and list purchase. You can pay a lot for the list You have to have a clear call to action and a very catching message. Need to tread very lightly in this space.
Richard – Using email for acquisiton purpose is broken. You come off as spam, pay a lot, people end up on your list who are not engaged or interested to begin with. Better to use other methods (viral marketing, your website, social networks) to find targets. You can use emails sent to current customers and then seeing who they forward it on to and have relationships with so there is already a more relevant list.
How many emails is the right number, and then when is the best time?
Richard – It’s the time that the recipients are in the inbox. When an open or a click occurs, you should be able to see that time stamp. That’s a fairlyl good indicator of when you should send an email not just to that list or segment, but to that individual. Over time you can pinpoint when is best to send an email to every individual on your list.
Greg – We’ve found the same thing in terms of looking at the reporting and it comes down to the client. Some of our clients email quarterly, some daily. Also depends on the type of program you’re running. In terms of specific day and time, look at your data.
Email tracking is great for positive relevancy, how do you cull list and figure out when you are no longer relevant?
Chip – We go through and say if you haven’t opened in the last three months or six months, we’ll make that cutoff, send some final message, and then take you off the list.
Greg – It’s all in the data again. See when people have stopped responding. Different clients handle it differently.
Pam – Make sure whether its your CRM or email sources, you need to be able to figure out who is silent and not responding, its just as important as knowing who is converting.
Is there is one thing to help people improve their email marketing, what would it be?
Pam – You should have a flexible, customizable solution that meets your specific needs. Embracing and understanding that the data is out there and knowing the tools.
Richard – We talked a lot about data and relevance. Think about the other channels that you operate in. Whether it’s media, networks or other mediums, the time that you spend understanding those mediums, take that time and go back and apply it to email. It used to be that you could just send out mass emails. So take time to look at the data, look at the content you’re sending out, and think about it as relationship marketing.
Greg – Fitting in with the theme of social marketing and this event, I go back to talking about email being the digital glue. I recommend that everyone try this with your email list. If you have presence on other networks, platforms, blogs, etc, use email to tie all those other assets together. It’s extraordinarily successful, spreading our message all around the social web. And be consistent. It’s just like blogging. Telling people what you’re going to send, what to do with it, and then following up.
Chip – recognize that email is part of overall marketing mix, marketing people have different sets of expertise than they used to, they are going to be data driven, processes are different, are going to look at microsegments of your audience, technologies used will be different, you’re going to be using different technologies, to have that you need the right people, right technology, right processes.
twitter – i mean – FaceRoller!
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on April 17th, 2008
Ok. I’ve been thinking all day about Twitter, what I like about it, what I don’t, and trying to decide whether or not I think this service is useful. So I thought I’d write a post about it.
But then, in my research about Twitter I discovered something even cooler! Check out FaceRoller, which combines the short text updates of Twitter with picture posting and geolocation. It can also integrate with Facebook and Flickr, which makes it a seamless transition from note, to social network, to photo album. All in a one step process! Now that’s what I’m talking about.
Check out Webware’s post on it here…
twitter me this
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on February 28th, 2008
Ok, this is UNBELIEVABLE. Sit down before you read this. First of all, let me be the first to admit that I frequently forget to water my plants. For weeks. And I’ve killed not a few African Violets this way. But these tragic losses have never inspired me to attempt to communicate better with the foliage in my house.
Until now. Apparently my plant woes could end with a few gadgets, two nails and a soldering iron (awesome). Yes, you guessed it, my plants can now Twitter me and tell me they need to be fed. I’m sure that this is the wackiest most ridiculous new media invention I have heard of… ever! Check out the story here and the Web site for the plans at the Botanicalls page (haha, get it?)
Anyway. The best part is that my plant doesn’t just tell me if it needs water. It also messages me to thank me once I do water it, which I always felt was lacking in the traditional plant watering routine.
“You ungrateful spider plant. WTF? I water you every Sunday and what do I get? No thank you, no appreciation, just the same stripey looking leaves you always had.”
Now I can feel appreciated by my leafy home companions. Better still, if I fail to water them enough, or alternatively water them in excess, they can scold me for my bad plant care. Which is perfect, because I’ve always wanted to get advice from my petunias.
All in all, I’m just really looking forward to what will happen next. I’m really hoping that my tomatoes will be able to Twitter me and let me know if they are going bad in the fridge, I really hate when that happens.
