Twitter 101 for Advancement
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I was asked to give brief presentation to our advancement staff on the various ways Twitter could be (and is) useful to Skidmore College's goals and messages.
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Twitter 101 for Advancement
- 1. Twitter 101 for Advancement Daniella Nordin Online Community Manager
- 2. What is Twitter? • Information network • Micro-blogging site • News aggregator • Powerful search tool!
- 3. Twitter Terminology • Tweet • Retweet (RT) • Reply (@) • Direct/Private Message (dm) • Follow/ers • #Hashtag • Trending • Twitterverse
- 4. Why use Twitter? • Real-time monitoring & results • Free market research • 300,000 new users/day • Opportunity to engage • Complement, augment and simplify (alumni)relations
- 5. Top Five Reasons to Use Twitter in Alumni Communications • Updates about the school • Get alums involved in conversation • Prove the College’s ability to collaborate • Specialized accounts for target audience • Promote alumni networks
- 6. So what? • Ways to track/monitor conversation • Use the data! • New content on Web page • Interactivity
- 7. A Word of Caution (or Things You Probably Already Know) • Social media is the vehicle, Skidmore is the destination • E-mail isn’t dead, just may not be King • Jury still out on donating via Twitter/social media • Jury not out on spam/over-marketing your brand • Think long-term • I’m one person, for things to go viral, it takes many (YOU)
- 8. See you in the Twitterverse! • Questions?
Editor's Notes
- There are two schools of thought as to whether or not Twitter is a social network or an information network. I (and the Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, Kevin Thau, VP of Twitter) lean more towards the idea of Twitter as a network used to exchange information. Example, the guy who tweeted the Hudson plane crash. He didn’t call a newspaper or send an e-mail, he tweeted it. Journalists, media outlets, citizen bloggers, etc. have taken over twitter as a place to disseminate real-time news. But people aren’t just disseminating information, a lot of users sign up for twitter accounts solely to consume news, and never actually tweet. Why is this? Because of the way Twitter is designed. It is a a micro-blogging site that allows uses to send text-based messages called tweets. Tweets are 140 characters or less and are designed to answer the question what’s happening. You have to be clever, witty, intriguing, etc. to get followers to engage with you. Because of this design, Twitter has become two things: a news aggregator and and powerful search tool. Started out as a way to communicate with other people but has evolved a way to share news, content and information in an easily-digestible format with enticing descriptions. But eventually people started thinking of Twitter as a way to curate or organize/customize the Web. You can share links to your own journal or blog post, a news article, YouTube video, etc. without ever having to open a web browser directly. Twitter is also a powerful search tool. Twitter has the ability to document and search real-time conversation (an advantage over Google since users are entering their information directly into the Twitter database as opposed to Google having to depend on indexing via bots or having to deal with SEO unfriendly sites). Therefore, by using Twitter Search or Twitter to find information (as I like to call Twoogling), more current, human and real-time information can be found.
- We already talked about a tweet. A retweet is basically a copy paste. Be careful about retweeting – it is seen as an endorsement of sorts. Before you retweet an alum’s tweet, check the last few. Make sure there isn’t profanity or slander, etc. Reply is just what it sounds like and similar to replying to an email only, it’s public. It’s great to reply to shout outs/questions, etc. But don’t feel like you have to reply to everything. Example: Sweeting quesadillas Direct/private message: again, what it sounds like only in in 140 characters or less. Example: MerryBubbles. Great if you see a typo for example but don’t wan to publically call someone out on it. Follow/er: on Twitter you follow instead of friend someone (like on Facebook). By following someone your opting to receive their tweets in your newsfeed. Following is also an endorsement of sorts, so again be careful and double-check. Hastag: a hashtagis used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.Trending: Twitter's Trending Topics algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the "most breaking" news stories from across the world.Twitterverse: the universe of twitter
- Updates about the school: keeping alumni up-to-date on lectures, research, events, etc. Alumni are more likely to give to give back to a school they feel a connection with. Example: HotelTangoGetting alums involved in conversation: get interactive with replies and hashtags. Example Lauren It’s important for universities to show alumni that they are collaborating with other universities and institutions to really produce the best teaching and research possible. Example Union TravelTarget audience: alumni might feel stronger ties to the part of the college they actually belonged to, rather than just the university in general, which is less personal. Eaxmple: gridPromote alumni networks: Twitter connects people across fields and businesses, making networking easier for everyone involved. So for alumni who might want to connect with others from their university for career or personal purposes, Twitter acts as a great connector. Example ThoroughGradBecause when you all 5, you get a happy alum. Example Claire
- So you have happy alums, you have people tweeting about your brand/institution/name/campaign and that’s great. So now what do you do? The first step is to track tweets and monitor the conversation. Don’t weigh in right away, see what people are saying about Skidmore, and then wait to see who (if anyone replies) and how they reply. They may do your job for you. How do you track tweets? There are SEVERAL ways to manage and track tweets, and I recommend using more than one. I like HootSuite for a number of reasons, but mostly because I can track everything in one spot. There’s also bit.ly to track clicks and referrers. TweetScan delivers custom twitter searches to your email. Hashtag.org acts as an RSS feed for custom hashtags as well. Tweetstats is another great resource that gives you charts and graphs. And twitter has some tools built in for this too. I put all of these into a monthly dashboard report using Excel. I track the top retweets, videos, facebook likes, etc. After 3 months, it’s too early to see any patterns, but eventually we’ll get a better idea of what patterns emerge. So we can USE the DATA. Last week the cost of tuition was trending. What can we do with this? Make the financial aid button more prominent on the web site, include it in outgoing packets, etc. We can also add it as dynamic/interactive content to the webpage. Powered by orange does this really well.