Twitter In Education

Higher education colleges and universities use Twitter in different ways. Some are very engaged, some are not. Some see it as a great resource and others as a great bane. Twitter is great and an intriguing tool because it allows you to engage your followers in a way that you cannot do via email or a blog. Whether you update via text message or use a client for your phone, being able to update the world with what you’re doing anywhere in the world anytime is pretty crazy. It is real time, always changing and very participatory.

Higher education institutions can use it as a very valuable resource, such as the recruitment department can use it to monitor accounts and answer questions and re-post headlines. Institutions can help its audience – be it prospective students or alumnus to get connected.  They can ask them to come to an event or share with them a YouTube video or blog post they’d be interested in. They can ask for their help and feedback, and help them feel part of the loop and still part of the campus, even if they graduated 30 years ago. 

Presley University uses it Twitter account to market to students. It uses the Twitter’s text messaging powers to accomplish this. It helps the University to get new students to use Twitter without ever knowing they are using Twitter.  This was adapted from Brad Ward idea which is:

 

Once you have a Twitter account, and you’re feeding it content using a service like TwitterFeed or by posting at Twitter.com, you advertise to students that if they text follow youraccountname to a certain number they will get updates on their phone. That’s it. Not once have you mentioned you are using Twitter to send updates.

 

Presley University started doing this last fall for people to get athletics updates on their phones and a decent number of people signed up. Now, when a new story is posted by our athletics staff, followers of that account get a text message with a headline or the score of a contest. The people getting the SMS messages don’t need to know what Twitter is or how it works, they just get the updates as regular texts. Don’t forget – after all that setup – you still have a regular Twitter feed you can promote and people can follow. It’s a win-win.

 

Presley University plans to initiate this for incoming students also as part of its orientation program. For this they have set up a Twitter account for our orientation team and have also trained them in how to post updates from the web as well as from their phones as they are out and about during the program.

 

Now that the Presley University and any other university has set up the team and the account, it’s time to start telling the students about it.