Analysis - by Patrick Thornton on Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:56 - View Comments

College media outlets have a long way to go with Twitter

Innovation in College Media conducted a study of 50 college media outlets to see how they utilized Twitter, and the results show that most college media outlets are not utilizing Twitter properly or adding much to the conversation.

Almost 50 percent of the outlets used Twitter as a glorified RSS feed. These organizations are using Twitterfeed or a similar tool to automatically push new content from their Web sites and blogs to their Twitter accounts. If people want to follow an RSS feed, they will follow your RSS feed, not your Twitter feed.

Needless to say, most of these outlets are wasting their time and missing a huge opportunity to innovate on a new platform. Twitter is about two-way communication. It’s nothing like RSS or other one-way publication tools.

Another 24 percent aren’t glorified RSS feeds, but they still don’t engage in conversations with users. Twelve percent engage in some conversations on Twitter, which is a good start. The bad news is that only 18 percent of college media outlets are using Twitter the way we would recommend.

These outlets are engaging in conversations, utilizing @replies, #hashtags and retweets. They’re crowd sourcing , building connections with users and acting as guides. These are outlets that get that Twitter can be a fantastic reporting tool and a great way to connect with users.

Here is the list of college media outlets worth emulating:

To be fair to college journalists and college media outlets, their professional peers aren’t doing any better. The CICM post has good tips on how to use Twitter. We have a screencast on how to use Twitter for reporting, and here is a list of reasons why Twitter makes sense for journalists.

Here are some Twitter accounts for any journalist and journalism organization to emulate:

  • @ColonelTribune — The Colonel is an excellent example of how to make a Twitter feed fun to follow. He is an excellent guide to all things Chicago and is an active participant in conversations on Twitter. He also uses Twitter to crowd source.
  • @rsylvester — Sylvester is one of the best individual journalists on Twitter. He is pioneering the practice of using Twitter to update live from the court room.
  • @ricksanchezcnn — Sanchez is one of the pioneers of using Twitter for broadcast media. Twitter now allows him to get in touch with his viewers and get their opinions. Sanchez frequently asks questions and displays the most interesting replies on his show.
  • @MsBeat — Our very own MsBeat is worth checking out. The vast majority of the links she tweets are to other outlets and Web sites. She’s not afraid to send people away from BeatBlogging.Org. In fact, that’s one of the main allures of following her, because she links to content based on its quality, not on its origination. She is a guide to all things beat blogging and social media related. She is frequently asking questions and crowd sourcing. Plus, she keeps things interesting.

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  • http://www.michaelpaull.com Michael Paull

    Your list missed The Lantern at The Ohio State University. They’re @thelantern – http://twitter.com/thelantern/.

  • http://davidonoue.com/2009/02/25/hawaii-athletics-on-twitter/ Hawaii Athletics on Twitter!!! « Social Media and College Athletics

    [...] friends from Australia, Adam Corney, sent me this link about College Media outlets using Twitter: http://beatblogging.org/2009/02/24/college-media-outlets-have-a-long-way-to-go-with-twitter/ (check out his blog at [...]

  • http://almightylink.ksablan.com/ Kevin Sablan

    In addition to your fine suggestions of Twitter users for journalists to emulate, here is a TweetGrid that lets you follow over 60 users on one screen. The list consists of journalists, bloggers, and journalism students recommended by Mark S. Luckie (@10000words) Paul Bradshaw (@paulbradshaw) and me (@ksablan)…

    Journalist’s TweetGrid: http://cli.gs/jgrid

  • http://onwardstate.com/2009/02/26/onward-state-in-the-news/ Onward State in the News | Onward State

    [...] Here’s a link to the post. [...]

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About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.