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- Recently, Fairfax journalists were issued a KPI to reach certain follower levels online (Crickey).

- 65% of online Australians are now using social media and 45% access it daily (socialtertiaryed.com).

- You can use it to follow people/ organisations of interest, and run specific searches to keep track of issues.

- All the other universities are active on Twitter, in fact, most have multiple accounts.

- When we tweet, we’re potentially reaching 10,000 people.

- We tweet about research, media interviews UQ is involved in, events on campus…

It's also a tool to seek information. We use it to search out information on issues our researchers are interested in, things our students might be doing or times the VC is mentioned in the news.

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- UQ has been working on a social media policy for some time. In the meantime, refer to the government policy. In short – keep in mind that the internet is forever and behave appropriately.

- Like in the UQ media policy, we encourage that you talk to the public on your area of expertise. If you stray significantly from that area, comment as a member of the public/ a fan etc. For example – if you are a UQ biology expert, and you decide to comment on gun policy in Australia, don’t say “As a UQ Professor I believe guns should be outlawed”. Just comment as a member of the public.

- The guidelines should be on the web under http://www.uq.edu.au/omc/tools-and-resources or http://www.uq.edu.au/omc/?page=214624&s=698032a11211f4a8d72ba23857a85a9d (Also a lengthier presentation on twitter here).

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When I started at UQ, the Twitter account was barely be used. It wasn’t

monitored, it just-autotweeted anything we uploaded to the news website. Our

engagement levels were really low and our growth was stagnating. As soon as

we started being engaged – tweeting more, using hashtags, replying and

retweeting – our click throughs, followers and own engagement levels grew

dramatically. We went from about 40 new followers a week to 80-100.

There’s no point in getting thousands of followers if none of them care what

you’re doing. All the UQ media teams running facebook groups or Twitter

accounts agree – if you get enegment right, folllowers/ fans will take care of

themselves.

We’ll look at metrics to measure this later.

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- Keep your tone Twitter appropriate. Casual is fine, shortening English to the

point of illegibility is not. Look for the most human aspect of your research –

what would you tell your mate, with no experience in the area, if you wanted to

get them interested?

- With handles, there are lots of fake accounts, and lots of inactive accounts.

Check to see you have the right one before sharing. The Aus Embassy

tweeted about Secretary of State John Kerry and the healthy oceans summit

and tagged a fake account. We re-tweeted assuming they would have

checked, and they hadn’t. Also, consider if the handle is worth your precious

characters. If they have five followers, maybe don’t bother.

- Same goes for links. Always shorten them using owly, bitly or similar.

- Keep in mind when you’re tweeting – for example, during the Baden-Clay trial,

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social media was all over the verdict and anything not related to that would get

buried immediately.

- When re-Tweeting or modified-Tweeting, be sure to put RT or MT in front, and

keep the original Tweeters handle. Retweeting is a great way to boost

engagement and build followers.

- Don’t spam – Once or twice an hour is fine. A series of interlinked tweets is fine.

Retweeting everything you see – not fine. Twitter feeds move rapidly, so you

want to stay active.

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- Some examples. To the left, tweets using The Conversation’s handle and posts, plus the talent and relevant tags. They have 53.1K followers, who are all very engaged with them. You can see we’ve modified-tweeted a few things. It’s always polite to put RT if you’re doing a straight re-tweet of something, or MT if you’re changing it, which you usually will. You can see in the far right example, we change tweets to bring the UQ value to the forefront.

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Jenny, Ian and Lee are all great examples of academics tweeting and they’ll talk later in more detail about what works for them. If you’re looking for some good Tweeters that are not science based try international relations guru Matt McDonald: https://twitter.com/MattMcDonaldQld, economist John Quiggan: https://twitter.com/JohnQuiggin, humanities dean Tim Dunne: https://twitter.com/timdunneAPR2P and climate change researcher John Cook: https://twitter.com/skepticscience

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- A warning. There are downsides to Twitter. People will target your account to

gain an audience or bring attention to an issue, even if you’re barely involved.

For example, climate sceptics, trolls etc.

- You can’t just publish tweets and never expect any feedback or engagement.

People will tag you with queries. You need to acknowledge them. People will

respond and tag you, and ignoring them can end badly.

- Don’t get a handle if you’re not going to use it. Maybe align with other

schools or faculties that have similar interests and share a handle.

- That said, don’t feed the trolls. When crafting a response, consider the

original Tweeter. Are they being reasonable? Do they have a point? Do they

have a lot of followers? Can you respond? If so, do so, even if you’re just

directing them to email you to take the conversation off social media. If

they’re a troll – abusive, unrealistic, a robot, possibly nuts, leave it alone. Do

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not engage. Don’t feed the trolls, because the trolls are more dedicated to this

cause than you and it’s best not to acknowledge them. There’s more about

responding to negative posts in the OMC Twitter and facebook guides online.

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- These aren’t the worst things that can happen on Twitter, but some examples of what you may be asked. In the first case, we worked with the library to address the problem and formulate a response. In the second, P&F.

- Both people were happy with the response, and started following us soon after and tweeting us private messages of thanks.

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- In summary, John Cook has a paper on 97% of scientists agreeing that climate change is real, and human impact is responsible. Climate change is a handle/ tag that attracts a lot of passionate debate. There was some claims from skeptics that the data was fabricated – they hacked the forum etc. A UQ lawyer threatened them with legal action. There was much outrage. Then followed a social media campaign to denounce the findings all prompted from one blog. wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/15/university-of-queensland-threatens-lawsuit-over-use-of-cooks-97-consensus-data-for-a-scientific-rebuttal/ - 414 comments.

- The first day we had 67 Tweets on it that mentioned UQ in some way and this continued for days.

- How did we deal with this? We created a statement and issued it online – only after The Australian wrote on the issue. Other than that, we ignored it. These were not people who would listen to reason. Sometimes the best action is to keep your head down and not give the issue oxygen.

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- Use Tweetdeck to create lists, search streams and pre-schedule Tweets.

Tweetdeck is free (Hootsuite is better).

Lists make it eaiser to keep track of who you’re following, if you’re

following a lot of people. Search streams are a great way to look at what

people are saying around topics you’re interested in, or seeing if you’re

being mentioned without being tagged.

Scheduling Tweets can save you time down the track. It doesn’t always

work, but it’s a good way to time manage in partnership with live tweeting.

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- As you can see, our newsmakers include academics, lecturers and UQ organisations as well as Brisbane focused news. It’s from this stream we get most of the tweets we re-tweet.

- We also can set up search streams for relevant campaigns. This was set up around open day, to see how what people were saying about the event even if they weren’t using the #Uqopenday tag – which we’ll expand on later.

- We always have UQ search streams going to see what people are saying about us. This has helped with the early pick-up of issues, such as the journalism degree changes and climate change sceptics.

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- You can always go back and edit later – unless it has a pic. Then you have to delete and start again.

- This meant we could set up Tweets for over the weekend, or overnight aimed at our international audience.

- You could use it for things like – prescheduling a tweet when an embargo on a paper lifts, or letting people know you’re about to do an interview/ start talking at a conference.

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- There are lots of tools to measure Twitter use, but most are paid. Free

ones include SumAll and TwitterCounter.

- If you’re lucky, Twitter will also send you a weekly email telling you about

your top tweets.

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Social media seminar:

http://www.uq.edu.au/omc/?page=214624&s=698032a11211f4a8d72ba23857

a85a9d

Tab: http://www.uq.edu.au/omc/what-we-do

I also have 101s, how to guides that I’m happy to share.

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