I know I talk a lot about Twitter, and I know my research is showing that there are not that many students on it, but I truly believe that Twitter will eventually hit a tipping point with this demographic. It’s encouraging to see so many schools name-saving their accounts or starting to engage with people.
I want to provide you 10 reasons to monitor Twitter as a university or college, all from the past 10 days.
1) Students think Admissions is scary (or maybe it’s just the workers?).
2) How soon until they are live-tweeting your group presentation?
3) Don’t forget about the parents!
4) Sometimes they are lost on what you want from them…..
5) And sometimes, they are lost…. literally.
6) USC to Student: “Can we not what?”
7) A 15-year old already planning her dorm room at your school? Hook, line, and sinker.
They are nervous about this whole college thing [usually about money!].
9) Get them the information they are looking for.
10) If they think you suck, why would they come to your school?
And just for fun, here’s a bonus one.
11) Quality control as a supervisor or administrator?
There are many more out there, I just wanted to share a few examples.
What are you doing to monitor your online reputation? The time investment is well worth it.
PS - Happy 150 posts to SquaredPeg!
13 Comments until now
Awesome catches. Reading all these blogs make me wish I worked in admissions. Curse these ResLife roots!
Appreciate the thoughts, brad….thinking about how that affects ministry, as well…
I’m a recent convert to twitter and have been stunned by the connections I’ve made during the first few weeks. Any sense of why schools/students haven’t adopted it more widely? Such a brilliant way to communicate on the fly…
Spot on.
I enjoy twitter and think it’s interesting but I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it making it big for prospects. Of course these days I have no ranch to bet…
[...] morale of the story is that if this Verizon Fios employee was not monitoring Twitter for brand mentions, my anger would have left me to some serious brand bashing. Instead of writing [...]
Twitter is just starting to enter the radar of some (few) alumni associations. These admission examples probably have parallels in the alumni relations world. Thanks.
Are there any services that generate an RSS feed of tweets based on search terms, similar to what YouTube does? I don’t know if I want to manually look up search terms every week.
Erik, via http://search.twitter.com you can enter your terms and then grab the RSS feed from the results page.
[...] and as Brad pointed out over at SquaredPeg, it’s probably a little skewed. However, Brad did point out (boy, do I sound like a SquaredPeg fanboy today, or what?), that there are some great ways to keep [...]
I guess I’m still unclear on what practical applications Twitter-monitoring would be. I can only imagine a prospective student’s reaction if someone from the admissions department actually responded to a message they thought was being sent to their friends. Still, I’m with you on the future of the technology.
It’s all about how you approach the situation. I do the same for blog posts, but you just have to feel out the situation first and foremost.
If they put it on the web, they need to know it’s public.
Check out http://www.twitter.com/butleradmission to see examples of other people I have interacted with via twitter monitoring. Have talked with some alumni and other community members as well.
Love all of the examples. I’m using Twitter at our school for these reasons (via an RSS) and find not many of our students using it. But, many students internationally are, which we are reaching out to. Also, my primary use for Twitter, after research is aggregation of multiple feeds!
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