According to many, Twitter has become an indispensable apparatus for gaining information, following news, and interacting with people. The UMB Community (faculty, departments, clubs, etc) has also followed this trend by establishing more than 20 different Twitter accounts. However, UMB has lower follower rates compared to other leading universities in the state.
UMB’s official Twitter account has currently 1,929 followers; whereas the number of followers are 44,370 at Harvard, 12,493 at BC, 7,493 at Tufts, 5,934 at BU and 2,236 at Northeastern University. Only when joined with the 5 UMass campuses does UMB enter into a top 5 ranking. But why?
“Twitter’s too complicated for me!” a female student admitted with a smile, summarizing the general tendency of UMB students towards Twitter. It took 35 students to find a student concerned about the topic.
”I usually follow celebrities and friends’ tweets,” Jessica Sic said, a grad student in English. “My favorites are Conan O’Brien and the people in The Office.”
Sic Just recently un-followed Charlie Sheen due to his “ridiculous” tweets. She prefers to follow “serious” news agencies from their websites. “I don’t want to follow news agencies in Twitter,” she continued, “because I don’t want to receive 50 tweets from the same person in a row.”
Following celebrities or chatting with friends is obviously one of the possible things you can do with a Twitter. But is it the whole point? When founded in 2006, Twitter came out with the slogan of “creating a conversation.” For this purpose, many organizations, public institutions, corporations, news agencies and local businesses established Twitter accounts to interact with their followers. This allows you to tweet the MBTA General Manager if your train is stuck and you are late for your exam.
“Lately, I tweeted to the municipality about a traffic light that turned over the wrong direction. They fixed it the day after,” Dave Pekorsky said, a senior in EEOS (Earth and Environmental Ocean Sciences).
A relatively new tweeter of 1.5 years, Dave was honest about his first motivation: “I heard that some places were giving out free stuff to Twitter users. Then, I got hooked into it with sports updates.”
Now, Dave follows tweets from the places he skied and the companies that he is interested in for future job. “But,” he added, “Twitter is not one way communication. You can receive or report tweets about traffic accidents, train delays or your favorite sandwich place.” He concluded with a story on how he ended up going to his favorite food place after receiving a new sandwich update tweet.
Returning to the low numbers, a tip from the West Coast may be a little of help.
“A university can distribute news alerts and solicit feedback from students, faculty and others in the community about a range of issues,” Rachele Kanigel said, an Associate Professor of Journalism in San Francisco State University. Kanigel gave the example of how her university put out the word on a major power outage on campus by creating a “SFSUilearn” account on twitter. Even this account has currently 131 followers.
“Universities can also,” Kanigel said in her concluding remark, “announce campus events, policy changes, staff changes, speakers, et cetera, and seek feedback by asking what people think of plans for a new building, for example.”
Following the Californian example, the realization of UMB’s dream to be in the Twitter league will require more dialog within the community.