Is your school twittering?

[Demetri Orlando]

Do you have a school account on twitter? If so, do you find it useful? How often do you post updates?

[Sherri Bergman]

I am a big fan of Facebook but I do not recommend that we Twitter. I think Twitter would require too much staff time to be worth it and I'm concerned that the "spur of the moment" nature of it would lead to indiscriminate postings. To be honest, I have yet to see particularly worthwhile Twittering - not even by the big companies who have devoted staff to it. It might have a value for quick postings of athletics scores and it could be a fun way to generate envy among non-alumni goers during alumni weekend but I just haven't seen a big value yet.

[Demetri Orlando]

Lorrie Jackson has a nice piece on her blog about automating feeds (e.g. sending a twitter feed to a school facebook page) to save staff time on posting to multiple channels.

I set up the Indy Schools Who Tweet page (linked on the tab above) to track independent schools that twitter; this gives some ideas for how schools are using it. I suspect that like many tools, as the use of them grows by our constituencies there will be more reason to consider using them as another communications channel.

In a recent survey of our parents at my school, we found almost no twitter users, so at the moment we are not putting any staff time into this channel.

[Kris Bailey]

Whether or not a school chooses to twitter now, I believe it's important that the school name is reserved so that there won't be the "squatter" issues we saw with URLs years ago. Sherri is right in that there is a lot of dreck posted, but a highly qualified communicator should be able to use twitter to the school's advantage, even now. My belief is that twitter and the ilk will continue to grow in importance and evolve in usefulness...but let's not forget to keep asking the key questions: why are we doing this and how does it benefit us??

[Rebecca Anderson]

We have been on Twitter for a little over a year. Just started trying to post more regularly. But we started out fairly conservatively--rewording on headline news stories and posting them. I am thinking through the issue of voice and how many of us should be posting. Any thoughts? Anyone out there using CoTwitter?