Educational Marketing with Twitter

I was just reading a post this morning about using twitter as a marketing tool. It talks a bit about how higher education might want to pay more attention to what companies are doing and how they’re using twitter to market their brand and interact with customers.

I must say that I’m feeling pretty good about how twitter is being used at Penn State. I think that we’ve got some pretty great communities coming together and with yesterday’s announcement that Penn State Live is now using twitter to send out news stories, I feel as though maybe we’re moving into the mainstream with things.

That being said, I think we have some work to do with thinking outside the box a bit and considering how we might start to engage people outside the normal groups.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog post talking about companies using twitter:

One of the most comprehensive lists of individuals or organizations who use Twitter is Jonathan Kash’s Twitter Brand Index.  This soon-to-be fellow alum from Norwich University’s MBA program has done a great job in compiling hundreds of cross-industry examples of organizations or individuals using Twitter.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Carnival Cruiselines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Air and JetBlue Airlines use it as a way to announce special deals and communicate with travelers.
• Amazon has both Amazon Deals, which offers special deals on a new product every day, and their Book Finder bot.
• Dell has a whole slew of people you can follow, from all various parts of the business.
• Home Depot has someone in their corporate communications office that is “moonlighting on Twitter to help out our customers”
• Wine Enthusiast posts “Twitter only” deals on wine, polls for followers and generally amusing wine-related articles.
• H&R Block has someone on Twitter to engage customers and give tax advice.
• Non-profits such as the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and March of Dimes, post news stories and announcements that are of interest to their users.
• Government agencies are also getting in on the fun – NASA has over 2,000 followers, you can get live updates from both the House and the Senate, and many state and local governments are providing updates as well (including my home state of Vermont!).
• If it’s culture you want, you can get it from a number of museums, including the Smithsonian and the US Holocaust Museum.

Now, here’s some ideas they put forth for educational uses:

Think about how your institution can use the tool beyond syndicating news releases and sports results.  How can you create value for prospective students, current students, parents, and alumni?  Here are a few ideas to get your started:

• Give out an application/interview/campus visit tip of the day
• Offer quirky advise to students who have enrolled and are going to be moving onto campus soon
• Negotiate with your bookstore to offer occasional coupons and specials just for Twitter users

I personally love these ideas. I’ve been toying with some ideas to use twitter for World Campus students and the first idea I had was to use it to announce new sections or additional seats of courses that would be opening the following day. We have a lot of students that are desperate to get into a class that’s full, but if they knew that more seats or an additional section of a course was opening the next day, they’d have a chance to enroll before others. That’s value-added, for sure and would give students a *reason* to follow us.

I’m also considering making “special” announcements over twitter and Facebook so that students following us in those venues will learn about the ‘fun’ things before we use normal means of communication like email or newsletters.

Lots to think about, and I’m sure we can come up with many interesting ways to use twitter. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.