Improving Your Universities’ Twitter Engagement

University in Focus – Kenyatta University, East Africa
July 31, 2015
COL Launches MOOC4D PORTAL
August 6, 2015
University in Focus – Kenyatta University, East Africa
July 31, 2015
COL Launches MOOC4D PORTAL
August 6, 2015
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Improving Your Universities’ Twitter Engagement

twitterTwitter  was launched back in 2006 and despite its long tenure as one of the top social media networks (as of the fourth quarter of 2014, it averaged 288 million monthly active users), many businesses/universities still don’t understand it or how they can monetize it successfully.

They understand that they need twitter engagement from their followers, but most don’t have a successful strategy in place to achieve that goal.

Fortunately there are many ways to very quickly create a community on Twitter. Here are some good tips to improving your universities Twitter engagement.

Give value on Twitter

This may seem obvious, but too many treat Twitter as a place to do nothing but promote their own agenda. They don’t spend enough time focusing on the WIIFY (what’s in it for you). It’s important to remember that your followers don’t care about your agenda. Instead, focus on providing content that will get engagement, content that YOUR SPECIFIC AUDIENCE WANTS.

Engage on Twitter

Remember Kevin Costner’s infamous phrase, “If you build it, they will come”? Well,  those words do not apply to social media, especially not to Twitter. For the vast majority of your followers, the rule of reciprocity will apply. You must give in order to receive.

If you have a large audience that is already retweeting your content, start by thanking them and asking open ended questions. If you are just getting started, find conversations around topics in your niche by doing keyword searches.

One of the things you can do with the advanced Twitter search, however, is to search for people asking questions. Simply scroll to the bottom of the advanced search page and check the “question” box.

Use images when Tweeting

As Kim Garst noted in her presentation at Social Media Marketing World 2015, tweets that include images receive:

  • 18% more click-throughs
  • 89% more favorites, and
  • 150% more retweets

Need I say more?

Use hashtags on Twitter

Twitter users use hashtags every single day in order to find content on specific topics. If you aren’t using hashtags to label your content, your university is missing out on the opportunity to be found by people who might be looking for the exact content you have to offer, people who could potentially be looking for your institution.

So please, use hashtags.

Tweet frequently

There’s no magic number for the perfect number of tweets per day. However, Twitter is a constantly moving stream of content and it can get quite noisy, which means that if you’re only tweeting once or twice a day your content is probably going to get lost in the fray.

According to a 2012 study, the average user follows 102 Twitter accounts. This means you will need to tweet more frequently if you want your content to be in the newsfeed when that user is actually on Twitter. If you’re tweeting only once in the morning and once at night, people who are using Twitter during the middle of the day might never see your content.

Experts recommend tweeting at least ten times a day using a variety of content, from tips to quotes to blogs to content that you’ve curated from other sources. If you have a large audience and lots of content, you can even tweet much more.

 

Credit : Sheena White

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