A real tweet for PROs
Posted on April 29, 2008 by tracyplayle in Blogging, Student Marketing, Student Recruitment, TwitterJust following on from my recent Twitter addiction, here’s a great post today from Mashable on how to monitor ‘tweets’ and use them to manage your brand.
Let’s consider the application of this, for example, for a university. Say a prospective student tweets that they’re trying to find information on a particular course, or trying to find something out about your university. Perhaps that piece of information isn’t readily available online, or it is available but well hidden. That university could then respond by either quickly putting the relevant piece of information up on their site, and provide a link back to the person who tweeted in the first place, or by supplying the link to that person. Surely this is just basic social media monitoring that all universities and similar organisations should be doing, but perhaps don’t yet have the time and resources to manage.
Excellent post. Definitely a great use for social media monitoring for universities and colleges. Being able to hear that request in real-time and responding to the need would very much impress that potential student for any institution.
Being able to see potentially brand damaging photos or videos posted by students would also be an important application. Knowing the most important issues for students considering attending an institution and what other institutions a prospective student would be also considering would give administrators insight into how they compare.
As well, the ability to understand which sites are the most influential in terms of that university’s brand and whether those sites were advocates or not would give administrators the ability to understand where to focus their outreach and who students look to for advice.
David Alston
Radian6