RSSTwitter as a Marketing Tool
August 20th, 2008 by Karlyn Morissette 
In her guest post yesterday, Rachel Reuben argued that higher education hadn’t quite found a use for Twitter yet. I’ve long argued that higher ed should be paying less attention to what other colleges are doing and more attention to what other industries are up to. While it may be true that few colleges out there are effectively utilizing Twitter, if they looked outside of its walls they would find many example of other industries utilizing it to effectively market to and communicate with their audiences.
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.
I could keep going and going. Note that with the exception of Dell, I stayed clear of all the tech-related examples on Jonathan’s list to prove a point - Twitter isn’t just for techies. There is no reason why higher education cannot successfully use this tool when so many “traditional” organizations have.
There were two threads running throughout the better Twitter pages I viewed:
- Special offers that are only available on Twitter: If you want people to follow you on Twitter, you have to give them a reason - something special they can’t get anywhere else.
- A genuine effort to engage and (perhaps more importantly) help your users. Yes, some of the sites I listed above just posted news stories and if people want that, more power to ‘em. However, the ones like Home Depot and H&R Block, which not only posted useful information but also engaged with the people following them were far more compelling.
- 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
Posted in Marketing, Promotion, Social Media | 
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August 20th, 2008 at 7:36 am
A few more potential higher ed uses:
- A dedicated Twitter feed of athletics results, updated as soon as the game is over
- What’s for lunch that day in the dining halls
- retweet mentions of your institution in news papers or blogs
- computing status updates (we’re doing this at Allegheny: http://twitter.com/ACcomputernews)
August 20th, 2008 at 8:12 am
[...] 20, 2008 · No Comments 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 [...]
August 20th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Fantastic post, Karlyn! Way to light a fire under us. I agree that we should be looking to best in class and innovators - even if they are outside higher ed.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Wow, loved this post, Karlyn, and definitely agree with your viewpoint. Great to see so many mainstream uses of Twitter compiled into one list; definitely going to have to refer friends back here to show them Twitter is far from leading edge only.
One thought though: if you use Twitter to offer promotions and incentives to followers, doesn’t there still need to be some greater purpose to the account in the first place? I mean, maybe it’d generate some interest in the brand, but I feel like it should do more, too. Maybe I misunderstand and you’re recommending pairing this with some other sort of marketing endeavor.
Dining services on my campus started using Twitter at the beginning of last year. I was EXTREMELY impressed (and surprised)!
August 20th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Thanks for highlighting my project, Karlyn! What started as an experiment has grown considerably.
In moving to a wiki format, I’ve been inviting people to contribute to the site. Dell and others use this resource to present up to date info to users. Anyone interested should drop me a note!
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
solid post! i signed for an account ages ago, and i have not really used it that much right now… but hey, this post inspires me to use the power of twitter…
August 24th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Great post Karlyn. So many great uses within higher ed.
Along with promotions and incentives, what about specific schools within the university getting involved? Application/registration/news/info/updates deadlines from the business school, the communications school, etc. So many possibilities.
The athletics use is brilliant too.
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:19 am
It’s true that the higher ed case studies are pretty lean. I also looked into the Brand Index (great site!) and found Michigan State Univ. to be the most active — but not necessarily innovative.
But also consider that one SPECULATED use is for emergency communications… I’ve heard that the Virginia Tech calamity left a lot of universities exploring SMS-based systems for these circumstances.
October 21st, 2008 at 8:48 am
[...] I’ve started reading up on how it applies to secondary and higher ed. In August, the blog .eduGuru offered up a smart take on how the higher education community should approach using Twitter. In [...]