Thursday, March 11th 2010

By unknown

Rohan Nair

I brought Twitter to the MSU. It was last year during Vishal Tiwari’s presidential campaign, in which I implemented Twitter into Vishal’s website so he could send updates via his BlackBerry.

This led to a big controversy over whether the MSU was supplying Vishal with too many resources etc, and Twitter was banned, leading many to look into what it actually was.

From then on, SRA members seemed to jump on board, so I made my next big contribution: the #McSU hash tag that is used to group Tweets relating to the MSU. This is now being used by almost every SRA member who Tweets, and #McSU tweets are being displayed on the front page of the MSU website.

But I don’t think any MSU executives understand how to use Twitter properly.

A lot of platforms have promised Twitter use, the most relevant being Mary Koziol’s.

However, Twitter seems to have close to no advantage in terms of engaging students, and this is easily measurable.

If you look at the follower lists of many SRA members, you tend to see the same names, and the majority of these names tend to be following one another, and happen to be SRA members.

Exactly who are people engaging if the only ones following their tweets are their colleagues, who already know what’s happening?

Next, look at the content of Tweets. People are using them to say where they are, more than actually providing information.

If you want to engage people using Twitter, tweet about stuff that people care about: link to upcoming Bylaw changes, or policy statements.

Finally, a blog and Twitter are not mutually exclusive.

On the contrary, they need to support one another.

You write a blog post, and then send a tweet that you have a new blog post. Hopefully, someone reads your tweet and retweets it so that their followers can read it.

These are all metrics that Twitter provides, but it seems that nobody on the SRA understands this.

Stop talking about Twitter, because it doesn’t work until you have actual content that people want to read.

If you want an example of someone who uses Twitter very well, and provides good information, follow @d_phrase.

It’s the Twitter account of Dave Fraser, who works for Peter George. He doesn’t Tweet about Mac but still, it’s hilarious.