and of course, this practice goes against the most fundamental accessibility principles.

Note that in response to suggestions that this survey shouldn’t be restricted to Russell Group Universities, the aim was for a small-scale and light-weight survey which would have sufficient variety to illustrate a diversity of approaches. The Russell Group Universities provide a good geographical spread, with institutions based in the four home countries. Since these institutions describe themselves as “the 20 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector” we might expect to see good practices which the wider community may find useful.

If the survey approach I have used is felt to be useful then I would encourage others to carry out similar surveys across their region, group (e.g. the 1994 Group) or, perhaps, other official institutional use of Twitter within an institution. Note that I’d also encourage anyone carrying out such surveys to openly publish the results.

Your table and discussion draws out the fact that few of the accounts are following others’ back. For growing and developing Twitter presences this is hugely important, particularly for curating real 2-way communication on Twitter. It’s something we have been doing for the AddressingHistory project’s twitter account and it certainly helped us grow our engaged audience quickly. Use of #FF (Follow Friday) posts, retweets and replies also give a really different character to a Twitter account than a one way stream of updates (no matter how good those updates are).

The stats above are really helpful but it would be interesting to think more about the content of Tweets – as Richard has said the 20 page guidelines felt a little heavy handed but reflection on what works in this space is required and it can take a while to get what you tweet quite right. What I think is also interesting when you look at the main institutional accounts (as above) is the role of department – is the Twitter account led by PR and marketing staff, by alumni staff, by registration staff, by the IT department, by academics? It makes a huge difference to interest, engagement and the way in which the institution is represented. Where other accounts for an institution exist there can, however, be some interesting scope for strategic retweeting to ensure a consistent forcus for each stream but also cross-pollination across content and audiences.

A few notes on profiles to add to your discussion:

- Transparency around accounts – Marketing and social media companies in particular (others too) increasingly use their profile text to indicates who tweets indicating usernames as well as loose department (e.g. this account is updated by our social media team @name1 @name2 and @name3) to encourage a connection between personal professional identities (that may precede company affiliations) and personalise the corporate presence. There are all sorts of reasons why this may not be quite right for HE/FE type institutions but it’s a practice worth being aware of.

- Geolocating tweets/profiles – I think that city/country etc. are relatively machine readable in the context of Twitter (so long as the locations are spelled correctly!) as the API is fairly robust and using tools like Unlock it’s possible to turn a text placename into a map location automatically for mashups etc. However giving a location as just “UK” or “Scotland” is not as useful. I’d certainly think any University would be happy to identify their nearest city or town – although for multi-campus institutions I can see there could be good reasons for not doing so. Geolocating individual tweets would be a fantastic additional way for an organisational account to be found but it’s only going to be appropriate in certain circumstances such as high profile events, conferences or building openings.

- Profile image/completeness – I agree entirely with your best practice bullets and would add that complete profiles that link back to official institutional webpages is crucial in any social media space (including Facebook where people often forget that it is the small info panel that most see not the fuller info tab). I would add that a well branded properly scaled profile image is crucial to branding any Twitter presence – it will take most designers a few minutes to create this but it has far greater impact than a poorly scaled/low resolution/inexpertly created profile image. We’ve simplified our logos for some social media profile images because these are your most visible branding on most of what you will post – particularly given the usage of third party apps for services like Twitter.

- Wallpapers – I agree that the wallpaper area behind a profile is less seen but can be useful however the move to “new twitter” – which has just recently been activated for a lot of existing Twitter accounts – compromises screen estate. You are now looking at about 10% of the screen either side of the main Twitter panel making text harder to read and make use of. As wallpapers are images any text will only ever be human readable and will not link back to webpages so I think it’s important to make good impact rather than the fullest textual impression here – we’re currently redesigning the Twitter wallpapers here to take account of the changes.

Finally, on verification, as Twitter currently have this set up it’s only suitable where there are a high number of duplicate, satire or confusable accounts. For many universities this is unlikely to be the case but I think they will be bringing in a new system that allows for wider verification – though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this was a revenue generating activity as names can not be entirely disambiguated and as it stands there is an inherant trustworthiness and value to that verified rosette.

OK, that’s more than enough from me. Thanks for this post and the discussion though – Twitter has gone sufficiently mainstream in the last year that I think we’ll be seeing many more discussions of this kind over the coming months.

- Nicola Osborne, EDINA Social Media Officer

Their source code is just a mass of javascript but most of the links in Twitter are surrounded by nofollow tags, in the hope that spammers don’t use them to boose their ratings.

I suppose we all remember the derision with which the Government’s 20 page guide to using Twitter was met – but it had useful suggestions and, as you’ve observed here, getting it right is clearly non-trivial!

I noticed a while back that Twitter has (or had) a verification system, for distinguishing official celebrity and world leader accounts from those that would spoof them – do you think something that might be warranted, whether maintained by Twitter or some authoritative body within HE? (An aggregation of all such official accounts would also grow to be an interesting record.)

More than happy to discuss our experiences, and share best practice with anyone interested.

I’ve long had an interest in HE leaders usage of Twitter specifically (see blog post: http://bit.ly/aHfYJn). From my limited research although institutions tend to have corporate Twitter accounts there are very few Vice-Chancellors that adopt the social networking site to engage with staff, student and other stakeholders.

I hypothesise in my blog that there are several reasons why this occurs including the perception that it can interrupt work; takes too much time; opens them up to attack etc. But in the case of Dominic Shellard of DeMontfort, his tweets have received nothing but praise for is quick and open behaviour from staff and students alike.

They view him as someone they can approach, and unlike large numbers of VC’s he is known when he roams the campus. The morale is high, the appreciation of the university and support for it is also high and so support for what the benefits of higher education are is felt through all members of the community who ‘follow’ him.

If only this can be encouraged.

I’d be interested in hearing thoughts on why it is so difficult to encourage senior management to engage in the social media world?

I agree with the idea of making it clearer what sort of activity the account will be used for, and ultimately, linking to an about/help page. This could also serve as a useful entry point to our Twitter feed from our website.

Barney Brown
Digital Communications Manager
University of Cambridge