IU in the top 10 colleges for Twitter account use

IU ranked in the top 10 colleges for the use of the social networking site Twitter in a recent study conducted by Universitiesandcolleges.org.

“We were kind of curious and saw that Twitter was taking off and getting lots of attention,” Scott Johnson, editor of Universitiesandcolleges.org,said. “We thought it would be a good thing to look into and see how it’s utilized.”

Listed as an “early adopter” in the survey, IU was ranked sixth for its number of university-affiliated accounts, fourth for number of Twitter followers and eighth for total “tweets” per day.

Administrators of the survey used the top 100 colleges established by the U.S. News and World America’s Best Colleges 2010 to conduct the study.

According to the study, each of the top 100 colleges has at least one Twitter account, with the majority of colleges falling into a few categories, such as official school accounts, schools and departments within universities, student services and outward-facing bodies.

Filippo Menczer, an associate professor of informatics and computer science at IU, said some details are missing in the study, such as size of the university and number of students who attend each university.

“If you take it at face value, the only conclusion I am able to draw is we have a tech-savvy population,” said Menczer.

Johnson said organizers of the study discussed taking into account the number of students at each university and the size of the university but discovered there would be too much information to complete the report.

“We tried to narrow it down a bit to see how the schools themselves were trying to use it,” he said. “Bigger schools are going to have more different departments, and that should definitely be taken into account. But it’s not a competition for who’s best.”

Schools within IU and other universities are using Twitter and other social sites to reach their constituents, Menczer said.

As part of the Web site redesign for the School of Informatics and Computing,
Menczer said focus groups were gathered to discuss better ways of communication.
During the discussion, he said some current students brought up the idea of putting information on Facebook instead of maintaining a Web site.

“We analyzed student traffic, and Facebook was by far the most popular site,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we’ll stop having a Web site. But if that’s where they are, then that’s where we need to be.”

Freshman Sarah Orth said she does not use Twitter and feels like the site is “stalkerish.”

“It’s a good way to get information out there,” she said. “But it could change from being about the school to being unnecessary.”

Technology can be a good thing, Orth said, but students need to learn how to communicate face-to-face.

Putting information on social networking sites instead of sending it through e-mails is less formal, Orth said.

“E-mails are a more direct way to communicate,” she said. “I like to keep school separate from my social life.”

However, Menczer said the trend of informing students through networking sites has already begun.

“Just like 10 to 15 years ago when everyone started getting a Web site,” he said. “Now you can’t even imagine a department without a Web site. As we have a broader diversity of media, we adapt.”