My department has a twitter account (@uwmreshalls) and I’m sure may of yours do as well. Ed Cabellon has provided some great recommendations to use twitter to connect with students. I faithfully practice one of his recommendations: searching your institution name on Twitter.
Running that search everyday can get a little time consuming, and if your institution gets a lot of press you’ll see a lot of tweets from non-students. I’ve solved that problem by importing the RSS feed for each twitter search I monitor into my Google Reader account. This has made everything so much easier! Not only can I mark tweets as read, I can search the tweets for key words such as “apply,” “accepted” or “housing.”
Using Google Reader allows me to monitor more searches than I normally would, so I can search twitter for the words students use to refer to our services. This means searching for “dorm” even though we consider that a dirty word (we’re residence halls!), searching for each of our buildings, the name of our institution, etc. I’ve even started a search for “campus” with geographic limitations to see what comes up.
Do you have unique strategies for managing your department’s twitter activities?
