Twitter

[Aaron Rester]

Does your school have an official presence on Twitter? How do you use it?

[Ann White]

I twitter for our university. We run the feed through some of our social networking options, and use it for informal announcements. It's nice to have an easy option for fresh content.

I will admit that I have become rather uncreative as it is summer and there are very few events to announce. I would be interested to see how others use it, especially during slow times.

[Bradjward]

I run an RSS feed through twitterfeed for http://www.twitter.com/butlersports, and our Bloggers tweet (http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/05/15/using-twitter-for-studen...), but that's it.

[Mike Richwalsky]

We do the same - passing our news and athletics RSS feeds through Twitterfeed.

http://twitter.com/alleghenycol

[Kyle James]

Aaron,

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Twitter in the higher ed blog-o-sphere lately. I have setup a twitter page for Wofford College, but haven't done anything with it yet besides reserve the name.

Instead of rewriting my feelings about Higher Education and Twitter i'll just link to a blog post I wrote:
Everything a Higher Education Marketer Should Know About Twitter

Hope that helps.

--
Kyle

[Aaron Rester]

Kyle,

Thanks for the reminder -- I remember seeing that post come through my RSS reader, but I had only briefly scanned it before it got lost in a flood of other posts. :-) Very helpful article.

- A

[Nick Catto]

I started a Twitter account for my school, University of South Carolina Upstate, last week at www.twitter.com/uscupstate. I just plan on routing some of our main RSS feeds through Twitter by using Twitterfeed.com. Right now it is posting our homepage news, faculty staff newsletter, our flickr feed and our YouTube feed.
We still don't have any followers, but I don't plan on marketing all of our social networking features until the end of the summer.

[Stephanie M. Cockerl]

All these uses are noteworthy. They will help me when I present to the Dean about getting a Twitter Presence.

[Nick DeNardis]

We manage our twitter account (http://twitter.com/waynestate) with people, the web communication staff oversees it and since we are the ones that control the homepage content, have PR part of our department, work closely with special events and pretty much aware of the happenings of campus.

We do not use an automatic feed, we created our own scheduler and short URL system. We actively search for any mentions of Wayne State in various formats and follow and start conversations with them. We also work as an unofficial customer service when students have questions/issues. Also we do not follow anyone back if they do not have a connection to the university or are a prospective student.

[Lee Brunjes]

I have actually been thinking about ways to get a bit more student generated content onto our site as after doing a little esearch into usage stats they are a huge part of our user base. Twitter looks like a good way for me to give some of our student organizations a bit more face time with the other student body members without a lot of overhead on our part.

Looks like I have a tree to bark up for a few hours.

[Susan Steele]

I set up a Twitter account for UM-Dearborn awhile ago, but only recently started using it. It's not a very elegant solution -- but it's something. Currently, our press release RSS feed populates the Twitter account. Also, we are celebrating our 50th Anniversary beginning in September. We have a fairly decent timeline of events, so I'm tweeting about events from the timeline (i.e., On this date in 1967, x happened.). TweetLater has been a big help for this, as I can create all my tweets at the beginning of each month.

We don't have a lot of followers, but I haven't done much to market it yet. And right now we don't have the resources to really create a conversation with it. I've also reserved a separate account name for our alums that I hope to use one day to create more of that one-on-one conversation.

[Eric Kowalik]

After reading about how Butler was utilizing Twitter as a free SMS service we decided to implement something similar and referenced it on some of our online recruitment materials.

Check out the left hand side of the page here:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/ugrad/admissions/bren10/

Turned out we had more people already using Twitter following us than students joining for cell phone updates.

Our recruitment account is here, http://twitter.com/BrenAdmissions and a few months later we created http://twitter.com/UCIbrenICS which just pulls RSS feeds from our news site and alumni and student blog.

This past weekend for our Homecoming we set up a page (http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/events/homecoming/) that displayed tweets from our alumni and students who included the hashtag #brenics in their tweets.

Unfortunately we did not get a lot of response, only a few alums participated, but we did not aggressively market it before hand so we will try again for the campus wide open house in April and see if more aggressive marketing leads to more tweets.

[Eva McGillivray]

Wisconsin Lutheran College will provide live updates of its presidential inauguration ceremony via Twitter on Friday, April 24 at 2 p.m (Central). The public can follow the college on Twitter @InsideWLC (http://twitter.com/InsideWLC). The Twitter hashtag for the inauguration is #wlcpres.