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Using Twitter in departments

There are even more plus points:

  • Departments have regular outside speakers and events. Twitter is great for alerting people to details of talks, seminars, guest lectures and parties. Add in tweets of highlights from people who are there and ‘the place to be’ factor is strengthened.
  • Many large departments are subdivided into groups that may be aware of what each is doing, or on developments in neighbouring departments. Again, Twitter’s brevity and immediacy is great at fostering internal communication.
  • A Twitter feed is also great for reaching students, PhD students, and part-time researchers, often the groups that are last to know about events they could attend.
  • Don’t try to combine departmental administrative alerts (like essay or exam deadlines) into a single departmental Twitter stream. It is best to run those through separate teaching accounts.


Using Twitter alongside blogging

The synergies here are very strong, especially for multi-author blogs updated frequently. Make sure that every page of your blog includes a visible Twitter logo (usually grouped with Facebook and RSS), and tweet about every new blog that you post, perhaps two or three times over a few hours with somewhat different phrasing. Popular items, or older blogs which become topical because of new developments, often merit ‘reminder’ tweets.

It is a good idea to use substantive narrative titles for your blogs that give a condensed summary of the argument. These can then be reused as the main tweet text, along with a shortened URL. You could also use Twitter to source guest blog posts from your followers. Doing this regularly will grow your followers and interest in your project.

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Creative Commons License
PILOT - New Technologies, using Twitter in university research and teaching by LSE Public
Policy Group and Marion Kelt, GCU
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.lse.ac.uk/government/research/resgroups/LSEPublicPolicy/pdf/Twitter_Guide_Sept_2011.pdf