Swift Kick Central

Twitter As A Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Provider (Updated)

In May 2009 I wrote a post on how to turn Twitter into a free SMS alert system for your campus. Back then, the major hang up was people had to have a Twitter account for it to work. With student adoption of Twitter hovering pretty low at colleges, this was a problem.

Last week Twitter recognized the issue and introduced an updated tool called Fast Follow.

"The mobile team here at Twitter has rolled out a new feature called Fast Follow, and its genius lies in its simplicity: text “follow [account]” to 40404 (Twitter’s U.S. shortcode) and you’ll immediately start getting that account’s tweets via SMS—without ever signing up for Twitter."

Eric Stoller, writer for Inside Higher Ed, reported on Fast Follow and how it could be integrated into the campus culture.

"You could place your school's admissions Twitter account name and the Twitter SMS number on your marketing collateral. A school could even have multiple Twitter accounts that could then be included on strategic mailings or promotional microsites. Campaign tracking would be a snap! Prospective students do not have to be on Twitter to use Fast Follow."

Enterprise SMS tools will have a hard time justifying large price tags when competing against...free. I suspect an advantage they will have is back end assessment data. Though, knowing Twitter's history of openness, might be provided by a third party tool soon.

Curious to know if anyone has tried mass, or even departmental adoption of Fast Follow at their campus?

School Website Design is Part of the Student Engagement Problem

In the first version of Red Rover's navigation bar, we included a 'Live Help' button (pictured below) that generated 5-8 sessions with students per day.

As more students joined Red Rover, we realized the 'Help' section needed to include more options other than just 'Live Help'. So we created a new 'Help' section (pictured below) and moved 'Live Help' under it.

Though we expanded the 'Help' options and 'Live Help' was still there, we went from 5-8 'Live Help' session per day to ZERO 'Live Help' sessions per day. Once 'Live Help' was moved, not a single student used the feature. It's not that an equal amount of traffic was dispersed to the other sections, but rather the entire 'Help' section was used less. I could say that our software just got better and thus students needed less help, but that's probably not the case.

With 'Live Help' directly on the main page we generated 5-8 sessions per day, but if the student had to click once more to use the feature it generated ZERO sessions per day. That's the difference one click deep on a website can make in terms of engagement.

So how many clicks does it take to get to your department's information on your school's website? Start at the homepage and literally count the number of clicks.

Each additional click means fewer students will actually see your content.

I know website design and UX design are not two more hats you're excited to put on over your 30 other hats, but as students consume more information online, our website design is becoming increasingly more important.

Tech Tip - Using Twitter as your Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Service

There are many group/campus text messaging companies that offer an array of services for a fee, but if you are just looking to communicate with a group via text, then Twitter might be your best free option. Mike Richwalsky over at HighEdWebTech demos how he uses Twitter as Allegheny College's free text messaging service for their orientation. The best part is students don't even need to know they're using Twitter beyond a simple welcome message. They can join the campus texting group without a pre-existing Twitter account. How?

Mike Explains:

Once you have a Twitter account, you advertise to students that if they text follow youraccountname to 40404, they will get updates on their phone. That’s it.

Last year, Mike used the Twitter trick to successfully promote athletic events on campus. This year, he's using the service to communicate with all the incoming students as part of his school's orientation program.

We’ve set up a Twitter account (@alleghenyorient) for our orientation team and we’ve trained them in how to post updates from the web as well as from their phones as they’re out and about around campus during the program.

Now that we’ve set up the team and the account, it’s time to start telling the students about it. We’ve posted on our Orientation site with a link to our regular Twitter page as well as how they text a follow message to 40404. We’re also going to start promoting it in our Class of 2013 pages.

They're also sending out the post card below with orientation information and how to join their mobile group.

Quick, easy, fun and free. Here's your campus tech tip for the week!