How are Colleges and Universities Using Twitter?

Have you done a similar study of the USNews national liberal arts colleges?

No we have not conducted such a study yet, this was our first one. That’s definitely a great idea though, as some people have remarked that most smaller schools were excluded.

This article was not researched well. The Penn State Athletic Department alone has almost 50 official twitter accounts, 24 of which are advertised on their website: http://www.gopsusports.com/ot/twitter.html. Beyond the Athletic Department, there is at least 25 official Penn State twitter accounts that I know of, and probably quite a bit more that I don’t know of. If Penn State wasn’t researched correctly, my assumption is that ALL the schools that are listed were not appropriately researched, making this article essentially grossly inaccurate and therefore irrelevant.

If you had taken the time to read the section on our methodology, you would know the sports teams were intentionally EXCLUDED. As for the 25 other accounts you claim to exist, a quick search for OFFICIAL PSU accounts revealed a number much closer to what is stated in our report.

You should take the time to understand what you are criticizing before making irrelevant and baseless comments.

Actually, your methodology section says “fans of sports teams” are excluded. You say nothing about official athletics accounts run by the university. How about the following accounts for PSU?

These are academic colleges, departments, or institutes:
http://twitter.com/PSUTurf
http://twitter.com/agsciences
http://twitter.com/ISTatPENNSTATE
http://twitter.com/PSU_IE
http://twitter.com/SmealCollege
http://twitter.com/nc2if
http://www.twitter.com/methodsctr
http://twitter.com/PSUEngineering
http://twitter.com/PennStateMatSE

Here is a variety of administrative offices:
http://twitter.com/pennstatelive
http://twitter.com/psudc
http://twitter.com/etstalk
http://twitter.com/PSHealthMatters
http://twitter.com/psuITStraining
http://twitter.com/EMSLibraryPSU
http://twitter.com/PSUORP
http://twitter.com/psulibs
http://twitter.com/PSUlifescilib
http://twitter.com/NorthHallsPSU
http://twitter.com/PSUBookstore
http://twitter.com/IntlStudentAdv

Another listing of outreach and other official Penn State services:
http://twitter.com/pennstatercc
http://twitter.com/GreenCareersPSU
http://twitter.com/PSUOutreach
http://twitter.com/psucpe
http://twitter.com/HBRbsnGalleries
http://twitter.com/PSUNYC
http://twitter.com/itunesuatpsu
http://twitter.com/PSUConferences
http://twitter.com/PalmerMuseum
http://twitter.com/WPSU
http://twitter.com/psucreamery

Is this baseless, too? Which four accounts did you count for Penn State, and is there a reason that all of these 30+ accounts wouldn’t also qualify?

I’ve just gotten used to USNews’ amateur statistical methods. The official accounts do nothing to tell about actual usage by faculty, students, or staff and in fact only show less than a handful of usage at major big ten schools. I would think that result of such a small data set would indicate issues with your methods and the results. How can you exclude such everyday life at a university and hope for the results to be accurate. I can understand it being a lot of work to pull that type of data, but this is USNews, I expected more and in fact there has been such high adoption at these schools for use in everyday teaching.

Hi There,

Looking to exchange links off our partners page:

http://www.collegecourseinformation.com/partners/

Your contact form seems to be broken.

If your interested please respond with your anchor text and url and i will reply with mine.

Best Regards,

Kevin

Kevin