Twitterpated

Patrice Thomas, customer and public relations manager for the University of California, Berkeley, started a Twitter program to reach the university's 35,800 students.

During a survey about its Web site, Cal Dining at 35,800-student University of California, Berkeley, found that a very small percentage of its student customers were using Twitter. However, as the program has become more ubiquitous in the media, Patrice Thomas, customer and public relations manager for Cal Dining, decided if she built a Twitter account students would come.

“At NACUFS when we talked about Twitter, I really just saw a use for it as a way to get promotional info out. I decided to revisit it at the start of this academic year. We still didn’t think there was a base for it, but I thought it was going to happen eventually so we needed to give it a try and maybe we could pull students onto the platform if we made it exciting and enticing enough.

We first started using Twitter for hours information during the summer. There was no real plan in place; we were just feeling it out. I forced some students’ hands to follow so I could build up my numbers. After students got back we started brainstorming ways to get students to follow us and we came up with the 10 Point Tweet.

The 10 Point Tweets got started because the idea of winning something was by far the best option to get students involved. Then we had to come up with something they could win that would excite students but also be small enough that I could give away several of them. So we decided to give away 10 meal points. Once a week we send out a question or quiz of the day. For example, last week we did ‘What’s the most popular Super Bowl food? First to tweet wins.’ Sometimes it’s the most creative answer. Once we asked for a picture from an event and the best picture won. There are 15 weeks each semester so that works out to be about $300 or so, and it ends up being one of the lowest cost marketing programs that I can run.

We currently have 170 followers, and that’s with very little promotion. We wanted to have our plan in place before we promoted it. I suggest hiring a student employee who is a social media assistant. Someone who can brainstorm ideas and help you come up with a plan. It’s very difficult to do all the things we want to.

Do some research and look at the available platforms. We use HootSuite, which is a free dashboard program where we log in and we can link all our social networks to it. On the dashboard it shows the things you’ve sent out and allows you to schedule tweets in advance.

I would also set up a search in an RSS feed that searches for any mentions of your dining program on Twitter so you can know when people are talking about your program online. Set those up at search.twitter.com. It stores those tweets so you can see who tweeted about Cal Dining, which allows you to respond to negative comments. A student had complained on their own Twitter and I saw it and was able to tweet back to them to make it right.”