Contributed by: Sherry Wade
Executive Web Producer, Stein Communications

Is your school twittering? If not, you may want to reserve your school’s name at twitter.com, just in case. More and more schools have begun to twitter. Think of it as a mini-blog — a simple, easy way to stay in touch with your constituencies. You have only 140 characters per post, so there’s no pressure to write eloquently. People who are pressed for time (and who isn’t) like Twitter because of that character limit — you can keep up with a person or an institution without being inundated with text.

Prospective students and alumni can choose to “follow” your school, receiving your “tweets” to their Twitter home page, their phone, their Facebook page, or their IM account. You can send out news items, admission reminders — whatever will fit in the character limit.

Most schools are using their Twitter accounts as a way to aggregate and distribute school news from a variety of sources. See http://twitter.com/valparaisolaw and http://twitter.com/calvincollege.

You can use twitterfeed.com to automatically post headlines delivered by reliable news outlets. For instance, you could search for your institution in Google News, and then share Google’s RSS feed with twitterfeed.com. A news feed may pick up some bad news, but using Twitter allows you to dispel rumors quickly or post a link to another viewpoint.

All you need to use Twitter is an internet connection or a mobile phone. To advertize your account, post a Twitter “badge” on your website. Set up your email preferences to notify you when you have a new follower, or click the “followers” link in the sidebar of your Twitter page.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 10:54 am and is filed under Marketing, Technology, Web.