Twittering in Higher Ed
The use of Twitter by institutions sure is a hot topic right now. Jeremy talks about it here. In one of his previous posts on this topic, I left a comment and he asked a follow up question regarding our use of Twitter at Allegheny.
I’m debating whether it would be good to have us out there posting info that few would read, or devote the time to something else. Let me know what your experiences with that has been so far!
I set up our institutional Twitter account in May of 2007. Twitter was still pretty new, but was gaining a lot of users. At first, I was manually updating the feed and posting stories when we had a news release. It was cumbersome, and I eventually stopped doing it.
I’ve been giving more thought to it the last few weeks and have started using Twitterfeed to push news and athletics updates to our Twitter feed automatically. By making the process automatic, I don’t have to worry about trying to find the time to post updates to it. That’s the key.
I see Twitter as being just one more club in the marketing golf bag. It certainly wouldn’t hurt any school to repurpose existing content and use Twitter as one more way of spreading the word about your school. I’m a firm believer that the more ways you spread the word - RSS, email subscriptions, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, it’s all important and it’s all a win.
Are we generating content exclusively for Twitter? No, and I don’t think it makes sense since we have, as you can see, very limited followers. We haven’t done any sort of marketing about our feed. If we do, and in several weeks or months, we have a large number of feed subscribers, I may have to re-evaluate that.
For now, having Twitterfeed push our RSS updates into Twitter is an easy first step for institutions interested in dipping their toe into the Twitter waters.
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