How to Get the Most out of Your Twitter Account – Some Helpful Tips for Colleges and Universities

Is Twitter Worth Your Time?

People have been claiming that Twitter is losing its share of voice for quite some time now. But the social media channel still has more than 300 million monthly active users which cannot be and should not be ignored.  The company still remains one of the biggest social media platforms worldwide.

In fact, the company is now more concerned about the hygiene factor of its platform due to which numerous spam accounts and bots are being removed from the channel. These spam accounts share unauthenticated and misleading information, which has negatively impacted user experience. The network is now working to correct these issues.

Twitter has always been a popular platform for trending news items. And even today it still is. People attribute Twitter’s popularity to factors such as trending topics, low character limit for tweets and user generated content etc.

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool for your college or University. But, you’ll only be able to harness its true potential if you know how to. Chances are, you aren’t getting the right ROI because you either might be pursuing a wrong approach, or perhaps working on the invalid elements.

To get a better idea of what is and isn’t working, you need access to a right Twitter marketing strategy. You can do all the right things on Twitter so long as you search for the right ones.

To help you truly make use of the Twitter platform in 2019, here are six tips that can take your platform usage to the next level.

1. Leverage High Performing Tweets from Past

Social media posts have smaller shelf lives. However, many times, what you posted in past might be relevant still. It could be a good idea therefore to re-use some of your old tweets to re-create the traction for you today. This can bring an element of nostalgia and help re-engage your follower base.

You can find your old tweets using advanced search data operators in Twitter. By entering the dates you can view old tweets from within the specified time frame.

2. Analyse Individual Tweets

Measuring performance is very very crucial in the digital world. Twitter does provide insightful stats for your tweets through its tweet activity dashboard.

The Tweet activity dashboard is a tool you can use to learn more about your Tweets and how they resonate with your audience. For instance, you can see how people engage with your Tweets in real time, compare your Tweet activity and followers, and see how they trend over time.

Click on any Tweet to get a detailed view of the number of Retweets, replies, likes, follows, or clicks it receives. Get detailed insights into who your audience is, especially those who engage with your Tweets. You can even download your Tweet metrics.

The Tweet Activity view lets you see data about the number of impressions and total engagements, as well as a breakdown of the various engagements.

This will help you learn important details about how your tweet performed, which can provide you with valuable insights about how to increase your tweet engagement in future.

3. Increase Your Tweet’s Visibility

You can promote your tweet to increase its visibility. Using this feature you can show your message to more and more users. ‘Promote Your Tweet’ button on Twitter lets you target audiences based on your budget, geographical location, demographic indicators and lot more. Although you don’t need to promote every tweet, but the ones having true potential can be given that space.

While following this strategy, select the best tweets that generated high engagement. This will give you low cost per click.

Top performing tweets are given under Twitter Analytics section.

4. Understand Your Audience Base

How much do you know about your audience is the key in social media space. Do you have an idea about their online behaviour or demographic profile.

With Twitter Analytics it is now possible to get demographic information about the people who read your tweets, including their various interests.

Such deep insight about your audience will empower you to create content that resonates well with your TG. It will also indicate covering themes and areas your audience might be interested in.

If you want to download your big data for analysis later at your convenient time, it can also be done. Just go to Tweets tab under Analytics section and click on the ‘Export Data’ button.

5. Create Twitter Moments That Last Forever

Twitter Moments is one of the best features of this platform.

Twitter Moments enable users to weave together multiple tweets into a slideshow to tell a more compelling story.

There are three ways to begin creating your own Moment via twitter.com. You can access Moments through the Moments tab, your profile page, or through a Tweet detail. To get started all you need is a title, description, Tweets, and a selected cover image.

Once it’s done, you can share it through a tweet to spread the word.

Conclusion

Colleges can use Twitter for quick and direct interaction with their target audience. It may be more useful in connecting with industry professionals than students. However in case your college is offering programmes for working executives then it might be a good idea to use Twitter for engagement with this student community.

Your University can use Twitter as a value added service for engaging stakeholders to provide information that they can’t find on the college website. Investing time and resources on finding ways to serve the informational needs of your target group via Twitter is an effort worth considering. It might prove to be an important strategy for the long-term growth of your academic brand.

By being active on Twitter, your Institute can add more follower base and build a credible network. Twitter is also the best platform to share frequent happenings around campus life in real-time. Such type of updates are very effective in engaging your audience and leveraging user generated content. Video has emerged as a leading form of content on Twitter to build traction. Your University / College can use it to create powerful stories to attract prospects.

Your stakeholders are still following Twitter so why shouldn’t you. They continue to look for trending and authenticated updates from your side which you can provide on Twitter. And remember, besides your immediate stakeholders there are lot more people on Twitter who can become your mouthpiece and spread the good word.

There’s lot many ways you can utilize Twitter and its big data to generate better results for your Institute. But this will happen only when you are fully aware about the network’s true potential. Academic brands can smartly use the platform to create leads, find influencers etc. With a well informed plan in action, your College will be able to extract desired impact from your Twitter marketing strategy.

In recent times, the network has faced criticism from everyone due to its slowed growth in terms of followers and bots and fake news issue. However, as a social media marketer, you cannot outright reject and completely ignore this platform. You got to continue leveraging its useful features by understanding Twitter’s strengths and weaknesses. The network still has the potential to drive long-term benefits for your digital marketing efforts.

Although, only time will tell how Twitter will evolve over a period of time but there are some inherent benefits of the platform which marketers across industry spectrum need to understand. This involves understanding Twitter’s current network ecosystem and how publishers such as educational institutes can align their business’s digital marketing strategy accordingly.

Hopefully these tips help you find a better approach for your Twitter marketing strategy in 2019.