5 POWERFUL WAYS

TO USE

IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Accomplish the amazing in #140charactersorless

The Second
In a Series of White Papers From
FATHOM ONLINE MARKETING
5 Powerful Ways to Use Twitter in Higher Education
Accomplishing the Amazing in #140charactersorless
By Dustin Brady

When Twitter was introduced to the public in 2006, it had a lot going against it. First of all, its
name was “Twitter.” It’s difficult to take a website seriously when all its users seem to do is
“tweet” their musings on everyday life. Second, many people didn’t get what it does. If it’s possi-
ble to post a status on Facebook, why limit yourself to 140 characters on Twitter? And isn’t Twitter
all about celebrities telling us what they had for lunch?

Despite those initial misconceptions, Twitter has grown to become one of the top 10 most-visited
websites with 65 million tweets each day.1 So either a whole lot of people are interested in Ash-
ton Kutcher’s chicken salad or Twitter is much more than a passing fad.

While Twitter has become one of the most powerful tools in the social media world, many
schools are missing out on its value because they still don’t understand exactly how it should be
used. Through this white paper, you’ll learn five powerful ways to use Twitter in higher education;
but first, it is important to understand what Twitter is not:

Facebook Lite
Many schools have grown frustrated with Twit-
ter because they’ve made the mistake of using
it like Facebook Lite. To them, Twitter is only Continue the Conversation
useful for posting 140-character status updates
and a few links. While Twitter and Facebook Thoughts, comments or questions
share a number of similarities, they are distinct about this paper? Continue the discus-
in enough ways to make Twitter far more valu- sion on Twitter in higher education by
able for certain applications. Through this white using the hashtag #hetweet
paper, we will look closer into these distinctions
to draw out Twitter’s value.

A Popularity Contest
Number of followers is the only metric many schools use to measure success on Twitter. While
it can be easy to fixate on this number since it’s one of the first things you’ll see when checking
your profile, it’s important to realize that number of followers has almost nothing to do with real
success.

“Followers on Twitter is a loose metric,” said Mark Greenfield, Director of Web

Services at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “If I wanted 10,000 fol- Retweet this
lowers, I could make that happen. On Twitter, it’s more about the quality of your
interactions than your number of followers.”

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Driven by Teenagers
Why hasn’t Twitter taken off as a recruiting tool? According to 2010 statistics, 11 percent of Fa-
cebook’s 500 million users are between the ages of 13 and 17, translating to around 35 million
teenage Facebook users. According to those same statistics, only 4 percent of Twitter’s active us-
ers are teenagers. Since there are currently about 106 million users on Twitter, 4 percent trans-
lates to only 4.2 million high-schoolers.2

High-schoolers and undergrads simply

aren’t using Twitter as much as they use
Facebook. This doesn’t make Twitter any
On Twitter, it’s more about less relevant, it simply means that you
may have to adjust your goals and target

the quality
of your a slightly different audience.

interactions than your How to Use Twitter

By talking to schools across the country
number of followers. and following some of higher education’s
best tweeters, we discovered five impor-
tant things every college and university
should be doing with Twitter. How is your
school doing?

1. Listen and Reply

If your school is not active on Twitter, start by simply listening. Use Twitter or a solution like CoT-
weet, TweetDeck or HootSuite to search for the name of your school and find out what people
are saying about you. You’ll quickly discover that there’s more conversation going on about your
school than you thought.

Bringing the results of your searches to administration is a great way to get buy-
Retweet this
in for your social media initiatives. When they see what kind of conversation is
already going on, it’s hard to justify staying silent.

After you feel comfortable listening on Twitter, it’s time to start participating in the conversation.
If an applicant expresses excitement about your college, send them a reply sharing their excite-
ment. If someone has a question or complaint, do your best to solve their problem as soon as
possible, even on the weekend. In today’s world, great customer service can seem a rarity. If you
can use Twitter to go beyond their expectations, it’s easy to make a long-term impression.

What kind of value does this quick reaction have?

The best answer to this question comes from Lori Packer, Assistant Director of Public Relations
at the University of Rochester. “I really don’t know how to measure the value of a tweet. What I
do know is that the Web is where people make connection and that’s not going away any time
soon. If we get better at making connections online, our efforts will pay off.”

In tomorrow’s world, instant communication will be expected. Instead of spending months devel-
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oping guidelines about how every tweet should be handled, just start tweeting. Provide the best
service possible for your users and results will come.

2. Introduce Real People at Your School

People generally follow others on Twitter for one of five reasons:

• They are looking for a benefit (coupon, deal, etc.)

• They are looking for information
• They want customer service
• They want entertainment
• They want a relationship

“Logo tweets,” or tweets from a brand, are good at three of these tasks: Offering information, of-
fering benefits and providing customer service. Unfortunately, people aren’t following your school
on Twitter because they want to be your best friend. They don’t want to have conversations and
they don’t want to get to know you. They’re looking for answers to their questions, solutions to
their problems and information about your school.

“People identify with people, not logos or organizations,” said Karlyn Morissette, staff writer for
.eduGuru.

If you want to use Twitter to interact on a personal level, you’re not going to have much success
through your “logo” account. It’s a great idea to
humanize your logo tweets by including a picture
and a brief bio of the person who runs the ac- Read our first two white papers:
count, but that alone isn’t enough to develop real Overarching Social Media Strategy
relationships. Facebook in Higher Education

To get the most out of Twitter, it’s time to change

the way our schools think about social media. Social media is not the responsibility of one
person or one office. It’s everybody’s responsibility. Logos don’t build relationships. People build
relationships.

By nature, social media lends itself much better to a decentralized approach. “Managing social
media from a single office isn’t going to happen; and by trying, you’ll just stifle enthusiasm,” said
Mark Greenfield. “Instead of having a single person manage social media, it’s much more practi-
cal to coordinate it.”

Your school is full of people who are doing amazing things and have interesting things to say. If
those people aren’t on Twitter, they should be. While it’s difficult to change the minds of profes-
sors and administrators who are set in their ways, consider lunch-and-learn sessions to educate
people about Twitter. Not everyone will embrace Twitter, but some will, and that is a start.

As you convince more faculty, staff, administration, coaches and alumni to tweet, you’ll notice a
shift in the culture. Social media will start becoming more about the conversation than the mes-
sage. Instead of encouraging people to learn more about your school, you’ll be able to introduce
them to all the interesting people at your college.

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3. Participate in the Backchannel
Remember when you were in school and you had a snarky comment about something the
teacher said? Wasn’t it frustrating to hold that comment until after class?

Now, thanks to Twitter, the conversation has expanded, and it’s going on in real time, all the time.
This backchannel can include a couple dozen students in a seminar, thousands of alumni at
homecoming, or millions of people around the globe during an international event.

Any event at your school, no matter how small, likely has an online backchannel. The question
is, are you participating? The first step to participating in the back-
channel is creating a hashtag (#) for every event at your school.
This hashtag will make it easy for people to follow the conversa-
Please tag your homecoming
tion, comment, contribute content or ask questions. By combining 2010 tweets with the
a Twitter hashtag with a live online stream of the event, it’s pos- following hashtag: #jcuhc
sible to attract a worldwide audience for a tiny on-campus event.

It’s important to remember that your hashtag holds little value

useless you promote it. If nobody knows where the conversation
is taking place, they’ll simply start their own. Learn from schools
like John Carroll University, where the Web service department
recently set up a page that assembled all the tweets and pictures
tagged with the homecoming hashtag. When promoting homecoming events, the school also
promoted the hashtag and ended up with plenty of online activity both from users who were at-
tended on-campus events and alumni who followed homecoming in real time despite not making
it to campus.

After creating the backchannel, the next

step is to interact with it. Consider Higher
Ed Live, a weekly online show hosted by
UCLA’s Seth Odell. Every week, Odell
interviews higher education leaders from
around the country, covering a wide range
of topics from social media to Web acces-
sibility. Recently, the show had one of its
biggest in-studio audiences – two people
squeezed into Odell’s living room. Yet,
every week, dozens of people participate
in the show in real time thanks to the Twit-
ter hashtag #higheredlive. Viewers use
the hashtag to talk among themselves,
comment on the conversation and submit
questions to the show. Odell does a great job of following the backchannel and addressing is-
sues that the audience brings up.

What events can your school live stream? The cost for opening up performanc-
Retweet this
es, seminars and discussions to an online audience is next to nothing, especially
compared to the value of the community it creates.

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4. Information Updates #FF
Few industries have been impacted by Twitter like the news One of Twitter’s most popular
media. Today, breaking a news story has become as simple hashtags, #FF, stands for Fol-
as typing a 140-character message into the nearest cell low Friday. Every Friday, mil-
phone. As a result, our society has come to expect instan- lions of people recommend
taneous news. great Twitter feeds. During our
interviews, we asked social
media practitioners for their
When news breaks at your campus, it’s important to start favorite tweeters. Here’s what
tweeting updates immediately. Your updates will get picked we found:
up by news outlets, allowing you to distribute the right
message before the press conference even starts. If you Featured in This Paper:
haven’t done so yet, follow the lead of schools like UCLA
and set up a newsroom Twitter profile dedicated exclusively @markgr – Mark Greenfield
to distributing news. Make it a policy to break news through (University at Buffalo)
this profile, and you’ll end up with much less headache dur- @KarlynM – Karlyn
ing big news events. Morissette (.eduGuru)
@mikepetroff – Mike Petroff
“While Twitter can be a social platform on a user-to-user (Emerson College)
level, it can see even more success as an old-fashioned
broadcast model,” Seth Odell said. “A lot of schools want @sethodell – Seth Odell
Twitter to be super social; but sometimes, people just want (UCLA)
to have our news in their feed.” @LoriPA – Lori Packer (Uni-
versity of Rochester)

A lot of schools want Twitter to be super @mrichwalsky – Mike Rich-

walsky (John Carroll Univer-
sity)
social, but sometimes, people just want
Follow These People:
your news in their feed. @tsand – Todd Sanders (Uni-
versity of Wisconsin – Green
Bay)
Do you have information-focused Twitter profiles created @rachelreuben – Rachel
specifically for certain audiences? Feel free to get creative. Reuben (Ithaca College)
Consider a Twitter feed for orienting freshmen or tweet- @MalloryWood – Mallory
ing intern opportunities. The dining services department Wood (St. Michael’s College)
at Tufts University even has its own Twitter profile that lets @TimNekritz – Tim Nekritz
students know what’s on the menu for the day. When the (SUNY Oswego)
semester starts, let your students know which campus Twit-
ter profiles they might benefit most from following. @dmolsen – Dave Olsen
(West Virginia University)
For those outside your campus, Twitter can be a great @coachfern – Paul Redfern
place to learn about what today’s students are accom- (Gettysburg College)
plishing. “For us, Twitter has become a great way to give a
@karinejoly – Karine Joly
bigger voice to current students on campus. We mainly use
(CollegeWebEditor.com)
it to speak to our school’s community rather than market-
ing ourselves,” said Emerson College Web Manager Mike @robin2go – Robin Bradford
Petroff. Smail (Penn State University)

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 @ninjarunner – Neil Bearse
5. Personal Enrichment (Queen’s School of Business)
Instead of getting discouraged when you’re not getting
the interaction you’re looking for on your school’s Twitter @EricStoller – Eric Stoller
accounts, start tweeting through your personal account. (Student Affairs Live)
What many Web practitioners in higher education miss @higheredlive – Higher Ed
when they look at Twitter is its power as a professional Live (HigherEdLive.com)
enrichment tool.
@chronicle – The Chronicle
of Higher Education (Chroni-
For many in the social media world, Twitter has become
cle.com)
the place for sharing links to industry news, contributing to
the latest discussions and reading the opinions of leaders @eduguru – .eduGuru
in their field. (.eduGuru.com)
@SMDistillery – SM Distillery
“People in my office see Twitter open on my desktop and (TheSocialMediaDistillery.
ask me what I’m doing,” said Lori Packer. “I always say I com)
learn something on Twitter every day that helps me do my
@minethatdata – Kevin Hill-
job better. Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it’s not use-
strom (MineThatData.com)
ful.
@erictpeterson – Eric Peter-
“Sometimes, I get more out of the discussion around the son (Web Analytics Demysti-
article than the article itself. I get to listen to smart people fied)
who do what I do discuss topics that apply to my job. It’s @johnlovett – John Lovett
like being the ultimate fly on the wall.” (Web Analytics Demystified)
@joestanhope – Joe Stan-
It is this personal approach to news that makes Twitter so
hope (Forrester Research)
useful for those in the field. For many, in fact, Twitter has
become the water cooler of 2011. Even if nobody else at @unmarketing – Scott Strat-
your school does your job or gets social media, you’ll be ten (UnMarketing)
able to bounce ideas off friends, talk about the day’s news @boazronkin – Boaz Ronkin
and ask nagging questions through Twitter. (Baynote)

Twitter is becoming so good at professional development Follow Us:

that, for many, it now serves as a substitute for industry
conferences. Every year, there seems to be a growing @fathomseo – Fathom On-
number of conferences and seminars for Web profession- line Marketing (fathomonline-
als in higher education. Time and budget constraints make marketing.com)
it impossible to attend all of them, and it can become frus-
trating to miss a session or guest speaker that has helpful
Retweet this
information.

Many professionals have started saving Twitter searches for hashtags of conferences and ses-
sions that they can’t attend in person. They often find the conversation surrounding the confer-
ence to be just as helpful as the content of the speakers’ presentations.

Even if you are able to attend a conference in person, you’ll find Twitter immensely helpful. “The
presence of social media has created a whole different experience at conferences,” said Lori
Packer. “At conferences I attend, I meet a dozen people in real life that I already know on Twitter
and meet a bunch more that I start following after I leave. It’s a huge benefit to turn an annual
meeting into a year-long community.”
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Take Ownership
Twitter’s ease of use is one of the main reasons it has become such a valuable social media tool.
It doesn’t require expensive software, technical expertise or hours of preparation. The only thing
that needs to happen for your school to find success on Twitter is for you to start doing it. Take
one or two tips from this white paper and try them for one month. Have an event coming up?
Live stream it. Are you finding an apathetic attitude toward social media on your campus? Take it
upon yourself to stir excitement about Twitter’s potential.

If you embrace Twitter, you willquickly discover all the opportunities it presents. Before social
media can take off at your school, it needs a cheerleader. Are you ready to take ownership?

About Fathom Online Marketing

Fathom is a leading Internet marketing firm located in Valley View, Ohio, specializing in organic
search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, online public relations, opt-in email mar-
keting, and Internet video production and marketing. Fathom works with clients in a number of
industries, from healthcare and education to retail and manufacturing.

Read the first two white papers in our series on social media in higher education:
Overarching Social Media Strategy
Facebook in Higher Education