I'm pleased to announce a new white paper from Alumni Futures, available as a free download in PDF format [1.2mb]:
Alumni Organization Twitter Profiles:
A Quick Guide to 10 Best Practices
As mentioned recently, I surveyed the Twitter profiles of 150 alumni organizations that use (or have used) Twitter. I asked 10 questions about each profile, gathering information on links, photos, logos, account names and more. Then I drew on that information to generate 10 easy-to-replicate best practices.
The first part of the white paper reviews the ways that alumni organizations commonly configure their Twitter profiles. Those of you who just want to learn the best practices can start on page 7, where the 10 suggestions begin.
Note: This is not a survey of the content that is in the tweets – I'll look at that early next year. In the spirit of taking a narrow topic and exploring it in depth, this white paper looks only at the Twitter profile information.
I hope it helps you configure your organization's profile to be more effective. If you like it, click the "Tweet this White Paper" button on page 2 of the paper to tell your Twitter followers about it! (Do this from your individual account – your alumni probably won't care that much...)
Bonus: Twitter Profile Worksheet! (Score your profile to see where you can improve!)
As a fun (and fairly subjective) aid to self-improvement, I put together a simple Twitter Profile Worksheet [45kb PDF] for organizations to use. Download and print the PDF, then for each of the 10 best practices from the white paper, mark how your alumni office Twitter profile measures up. There are four levels for each practice. Yes/No choices, however, give you just two options. For example, you either have a URL in your Twitter profile, or you don't.
To find your score: Mark the number of times you selected each response, apply the multiplier and add the resulting scores to get your total.
A quick look at the practices where you scored "1"s and "2"s (i.e., the lowest scoring areas) will guide you to the quickest improvements.
Hope it helps – and if you feel like sharing your result, leave a comment telling us how you fared.
