The CoSIDA New Media/Technology committee collaborated on this social media article series (Part 2 below), and discuss the pros/cons of the athletic department Facebook page. The articles were written by Chris Syme, Committee Chair, in conjunction with the commitee members.
see Part I: Feb. 25, 2011:
Social Media 101: Demystifying Facebook content for college athletic pages
When Twitter first emerged five years ago, its founder created it as a venue for fostering conversations -- sort of a Reader's Digest version of Facebook. The original question a tweet was supposed to answer: "What are you doing right now?" Twitter currently fields 140 million tweets in a typical day, or more than 1,600 every second.
Twitter has now grown to over 200 million users, and it has evolved significantly from the founder's original intent. Its functionality is much more sophisticated, and the social channel is now a major player in breaking news around the world, from scooping Michael Jackson's death to announcing President Obama's running mate. According to Twitter, the majority of tweets now contain links to stories, pictures, videos, or other off-site content. Currently, a minority of tweeters are responsible for the majority of content. Because of its nature as a news channel, Twitter includes a large audience of people who do not tweet, but just follow others who do.
So the question becomes, how should one use Twitter? The best answer might just be, "however you want." In a recent survey of the New Media/Technology Committee of CoSIDA, the majority cited they used Twitter strictly as a news channel. Because most college athletic websites are news-oriented, Twitter gives fans a real-time news fix via mobile devices. For hard core news consumers, this is the decided difference in Twitter.
The number of smart phone users accessing Twitter is growing every day. During events, such as the NCAA men's basketball tournament, athletic communicators and journalists are using a combination of Twitter and CoverItLive-type blogs to get instant news out to fans. Using photo applications, tweeters can upload event photos instantly.
Athletic communicators are also users, with 88 percent of them maintaining a personal Twitter account as well. With the increased scrutiny of student-athletes using social media, 50 percent of reporting schools provide some kind of social media training for their student-athletes. Only ten percent of reporting schools have a policy about tweet frequency and none of the reporting schools manage Twitter feeds for coaches. Athletic communication offices manage 62 percent of the Twitter accounts reported with the rest falling to marketing. About half of the reporting schools have separate accounts for different sports in addition to one main feed for the department.
As numbers of smart phone users increase, Twitter's value will rise. Already, over 40 percent of social media users access information via phone. These statistics make Twitter a valuable channel for event announcements, ticket releases, breaking news, in-game reporting, post-game press conferences and other real-time events.
With the inception of Twitter dashboards, it is now possible to manage multiple groups of followers on Twitter without having to access a Twitter home page (at
www.twitter.com) directly. The preferred dashboard is
Tweet Deck with 80% of respondents using Tweet Deck for desktop management. Communicators can also manage multiple Twitter accounts and social platforms from dashboards including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and others. However, Twitter integration with other channels is not popular with athletic communicators with only ten percent integrating a Twitter feed into Facebook or other channels.
Twitter went from zero to 140,000,000 tweets per day in five short years. What will the next five years bring?