140 Characters

• Step forward sites such as tinyurl.com, snipurl.com and icanhaz.com, which offer an easy way around this

• Should you use “txt spk”? NO!

• You pay nothing for a Tweet - continue your message in a second post

Twitter Data 2010

• 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010

• 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010

• 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010

• 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).

Facebook Data 2010

• 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010. • 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010. • 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.)

shared on Facebook per month. • 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside

the United States. • 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed

each day.• 3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.

Source: Pingdom http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

Flickr Data 2010

• 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).

• 3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr. • 130 million – At the above rate, the number of

photos uploaded per month to Flickr. • 36 billion – At the current rate, the number of

photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

A Latent Variable Model for Geographic Lexical Variation

• The growth of geotagged social media raises new computational possibilities for investigating geographic linguistic variation

• Their model recovers coherent topics and their regional variants, while identifying geographic areas of linguistic consistency

• The find that regional dialects are thriving on Twitter and local slang seems to be evolving within the social-media site

Eisenstein, O’Connor, Smith & Xing, Carnegie Mellon University, Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

Twitter in Higher EducationWhat Are the Possibilities?

• Research• “Twitter is without a doubt the best way to

share and discover what is happening right now” - @d_little_b a doctoral student from Lisbon, Portugal who studies social media

Does Your College Need a Twitter Policy?

• A Twitter policy makes it clear how your organization intends to use Twitter

• It should specify who manages Twitter on behalf of your college

• Let follower know about how many Tweets the will receive per day

• Tells followers whether your college uses automation (such as tools which generate tweets from RSS feeds) to post content on Twitter.

Does Your College Need a Twitter Policy?

• The policy can specify ways in which your college will use Twitter, such as for:– Alerts about new content on your main Website,

YouTube, Flickr, or Facebook, e.g., speakers, athletic events, on-campus activities, etc.

– Invitations to provide feedback on specific issues on which you desire public or student input

– Information from our the college’s leadership team about what they’re doing

– Occasional live coverage of events

Does Your College Need a Twitter Policy?

• Define how your college determines who to follow.– Do you automatically follow back new

followers?– Do you review your follower list and follow

back accounts?– It should probably state that following back

does not imply endorsement of any kind.

Does Your College Need a Twitter Policy?

• Thanks to the United Kingdom Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) for the use of the Twitter Policy

• http://www.bis.gov.uk/site/connect/twitter-policy

You Definitely Need a Twitter Strategy

• http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/bispartners/bisdigital/docs/t/twitter-strategy-for-bisgovuk-v1.doc

To Be Effective, Use Twitter Third Party Analytical Tools

• For current trends that are hot on Twitter (RetweetRadar; Trendistic, Twitterfall)

• Online reputation (Monitter, Twitter Grader)• Impact and influence (Twinfluence,

Twittersheep)• Unfollowers (Qwitter)• Alert services (TweetBeep)• Analysis of your followers using http://

tweepler.com/ and http://web.mailana.com/

Twitter Grader

To Be Effective, Use Twitter Evaluation Data

• Web analytics for your main college Website to track referrals from Twitter to your web pages

• Twitter surveys – regular ‘straw poll’ surveys directly on Twitter to ask for feedback

• Twitter data – the follower/following data presented in your Twitter account

Does Your College Need a Twitter Policy?

• When will you update and monitor your Twitter account? During office hours, Monday to Friday?

• Twitter may occasionally be unavailable so tell followers that your college accepts no responsibility for lack of service due to Twitter downtime.

@Replies and Direct Messages

• While you may welcome feedback and ideas from your followers, are you committed to reply individually to all the messages you will receive via Twitter?

• If the college digital media team reads all @replies and Direct Messages, then followers should know that emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant people at your college.

• In general, your policy should state that the college’s Twitter presence is nor to engage on issues of party politics or answer questions which break the rules of your general Website comments policy.

• The usual ways of contacting the college for official correspondence should be detailed in the “contact us” section of your website.

Thanks to Garin Kilpatrick, author of The Twitter Tools Book

Reciprocity is Key

• Reciprocity is a powerful thing– Follow and be followed– Retweet and be retweeted,

• You have got to give in order to get– The more time you are willing to invest in others the

more likely they are to give you the time of day

• Good Tweets are often conversational– You’ve got to talk to people to really connect with

them, it’s just that simple.

Schedule Your Golden Tweets

• Twitter traffic varies throughout the day, and throughout the week– The busiest time on Twitter is at the end of the work

day, between 3-5pm– Weekdays are far busier than weekends, and

Thursday and Friday are the busiest days of the week

• If you have solid content tweet it out when it can have the greatest impact

• Take a note from the most retweeted tweets of 2010 to get an idea of what works

Twitter Tools are Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

• Twitter Tools really are the bomb

• Hootsuite, Manage Flitter, Twitter Marketing Software, TweetDeck and the list goes on.

• By learning how Twitter Tools can work for you, you will give yourself  a competitive advantage over millions of others who neglect these powerful tools.

List Liberally

• People pay more attention to the people that list them, than the people who follow them

• Listing is a powerful method as to really get someone's attention

• Create lists for your different interests, for example I a have lists for community colleges, Web 2.0 Gurus, and Twitter Tools, among others

• Tweet about your lists and there is a good chance that people will follow them

• If your list gains enough followers it will gain greater visibility in list directories like Listorious.

Engage

• This tip is straight from my friend Brian Solis, and it has worked exceptionally well.  Brian has a massive network at this point and yet he still responds to every comment on his blog and to comments on his Facebook walls and on Twitter.  This takes plenty of effort but it is the reason why Brian has so much influence.  To learn more about this method I recommend that you grab a copy of  Brian’s book Engage!

Relationships Take Time

• Relationships are not instantaneous, the take communication and sharing over time.  To build deeper relationships with people you meet on Twitter it might make sense to connect with them on Facebook as well.

• To facilitate Facebook connections I created a custom design for my Twitter background that features a link to my Facebook profile.  On my blogs I try to respond to anyone who leaves a comment if it makes sense to do so.  If they have a blog as well I might take a minute and visit it to return the favor.

Add Value

• This point has been key to my success on Twitter, and my ability to achieve thousands of retweets.  Even if you are not an avid content creator you can still add serious value by sharing awesome content.

• Use Twitter Lists to create streams of people who share the best information and then share the  best content that they share.  Browse the biggest blogs to find the best content and create lists of epic content.  The more value you are able to add the more people will people will realize that you are a valuable person to follow!

• opportunity

Don’t Focus on Selling

• Everyone likes to buy things but no-one likes to be sold.  Twitter is a place to build relationships, and if you focus on doing that people will click your links and look for products that you have to offer.  Focus on the connections and the cash will flow.

You are Your Brand

• Resist the urge to use your profile picture as your avatar.  You are your brand, so act respectable if you want respect.  Try not to spam Twitter will dozens of Tweets in as many minutes.  I tend to tweet about one tweet an hour, sometimes a little more, sometimes much less.  Conversational tweets don’t count, as they are only seen by people who are following both people tweeting.

Remember that Twitter is Still a Baby

• Although Twitter is a household word at this point it is still only about 5 years old and it’s only been mainstream for less than two.  This means that there are still epic developments to come.  By having knowledge about the latest and greatest tools and tips you will be ahead of the curve and you will be able to skyrocket your Twitter success.  Sign up for our free Twitter  Course and we will let you know about our latest articles when they go live.