Tag: twitter

Five things I learned from the #DebateAutism Twitter chat

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What’s the point of a Twitter chat? For social media and marketing professionals, Twitter chats are a regular thing. They’re a good way for professionals to network, make new connections and learn from each other.

I’ve been kicking the idea of a regular Hallam Twitter chat around for a while, but it’s only recently that the pieces have started to fit together.

Here’s one piece: we’ve got a new university-wide strategy. It focuses on changing lives. We change lives, through educational development and self-improvement. Our academics are experts in their field, and their research addresses some of the toughest issues society faces.

Professor Nick Hodge and his dog Huck

Professor Nick Hodge and his dog Huck

For a university, a Twitter chat can be a way to engage large numbers of people in serious debate and inform our research and teaching. It can also be a way to raise our academics’ profiles, and connect them to people who are interested in, and invested in, their specialist subjects.

Our first academic Twitter chat took place on 21 March 2017. It was led by Professor Nick Hodge, an expert in autism who’s very good at using Twitter to develop his professional network and share ideas around autism. Nick’s research focuses on issues that affect the education, development and well-being of disabled people and their families.

The initial catalyst for the Twitter chat was Nick’s professorial lecture, which sold out very quickly. I was interested in working with Nick to raise the University’s profile among autism academics, practitioners and autistic people (and their families), by engaging them in a conversation about perceptions of autism, and the challenges faced by autistic people and their families.

Nick’s inaugural lecture presented us with an opportunity to explore public engagement with a very diverse and interesting community. Opinions and perceptions of autism vary hugely, and practitioners don’t always agree on how autism should be diagnosed and supported.

And Nick’s thought-provoking blurb for his lecture was the starting point for how we framed our Twitter chat:

People think differently about autism.

Some people think that children with autism need to change to be more like people without autism.

Other people think that we should learn to appreciate different types of people.

Sometimes arguments about this can feel like an Autism War.

Disabled people have the right to be who they want to be.

I say this means that we must support people with autism to lead lives that make them happy.

It is our duty to help people with autism to achieve their goals.

There are so many engaging and interesting statements here that I knew it would make for a great Twitter chat subject. The whole concept of a war of ideas around something so emotive and personal as autism seemed rich with potential.

But, of course, there are risks in tackling a subject like autism. We didn’t want to come off as authoritative and prescriptive. We wanted to be inclusive and open to ideas, and we wanted to learn from autistic people’s experiences.

Audiences

By using Nick’s own networks, we engaged academics and practitioners early on, by asking them to supply questions for the chat. We also raised awareness of the chat by promoting it to autism charities and societies.

It was important that we involved autistic people from the start, and one of the first people I contacted was Kashmire Hawker, the disabled students rep for the students union. Kashmire has a strong presence on Twitter, and was keen to be involved. He promoted it among his peers, and he turned out to be a really positive contributor to the chat.

Here are my five tips for running a successful Twitter chat.

Pick a good hashtag

We wanted to stimulate discussion. We also wanted to convey the notion that this was a genuine debate, and not everyone would agree with each other. We settled on #DebateAutism for those reasons. It was Nick’s idea, and it worked.

It also created a bit of a stir, because some people thought we would be debating autism’s existence. We thought that might happen, so there was a little bit of work to do behind the scenes to reassure people that weren’t going down that path.

Get the structure right early on

A Twitter chat is more than just a loose conversation around a broad subject. You need a defined amount of time, and some clear parameters for the chat. We used the idea of an autism war to frame ours.

Have a clear idea of how many questions you’re going to include in the chat. We started with six questions, but realised on the evening that we would have to cut one due to the amount of contributions we were getting. Ten or fifteen minutes per question is about right.

Work with your host

Having Nick on board meant we could reach the right people (people who don’t follow the main Hallam account). He’s very well-respected, and his involvement also gave the whole thing a genuinely academic flavour.

He works closely with autistic people and has a much clearer idea of what the risks are, what wording to use and what issues are likely to be important to people.

Crowdsource the questions

Nick did this early on, messaging his contacts in other universities and organisations, asking for their input. This gave us two things: questions that were relevant to the audience, and an already-invested group of people who wanted to see the outcome of their contribution.

Get a room

No really. Things can move very quickly, and the flow of the chat can easily overtake you if you haven’t got the right things in place.

Book a room with some decent facilities, and space enough for the three or four people that will be facilitating the chat. We had Tweetdeck up on the big screen, with two columns open, tracking chat around the #DebateAutism hashtag.

This meant we could see the general flow of conversation, and zoom in on specific tweets to reply to or retweet them. A colleague spent the whole chat looking after Tweetdeck, retweeting things that stood out as particularly insightful and interesting.

It freed me up to do replies from the University account and advise Nick on his responses. I also had my laptop with me so I could edit the question cards on Photoshop if we decided they needed some last-minute changes.

And being face-to-face with your chat host is a really good idea. You benefit from being able to talk things over before you respond online.

#DebateAutism

So far, there have been a total of 997 tweets which contain the #DebateAutism hashtag. We also saw a huge increase in the number of impressions, replies, retweets and likes our own tweets had on the day of the chat, and the day after.

Nick also saw some changes. In March, he gained 97 new followers, had 105,000 tweet impressions (a rise of 945.3% from February), an increase of  606.8% in profile visits, and an increase of 694.6% in mentions.

And people are still using the tag, and responding to our original questions, weeks after the Twitter chat. #DebateAutism as a conversation topic has plenty of potential to just be a thing in its own right now, long after our initial Twitter chat.

Would we run it again? Yes, we would. Although a lot of planning and preparation went into the chat, it’s had an effect on those who took part, and it’s still resonating with the audience.

I’ll leave the last word to Professor Nick Hodge.

He says: “I was out of my comfort zone going into the Twitter chat, as I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t anticipate the level and quality of support that you would provide for the event, and I imagined that I would need to sort it out myself.

“So the actual experience of hosting a Twitter chat was very different from how I imagined. I felt extremely well-supported and informed, and I was very impressed with the high standard of presentation and professionalism that you brought to the chat event.  It was an incredibly exciting, fast and furious hour that has been really positively responded to and evaluated by my Twitter community.

“This will make a valuable contribution to any autism impact case study for REF 2020.  Before the event I was feeling the onset of Twitter burnout, and I’d decreased my engagement with social media. This event re-energised my interest – it reminded me of the potential of Twitter to reach people and effect change.”

To discuss organising a Twitter chat at Hallam, drop me a line or Tweet me.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

Chris Husbands: Why I both love and hate Twitter

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It began – as some good, and many bad ideas do – over dinner with a couple of friends in 2011, one a national policy-maker (@johndunford), one a leadership development consultant (@LshipMatters). They persuaded me to sign up to Twitter, and, five years on, I have accumulated over 10,000 followers.

Twitter is equally seductive and maddening. There is always another tweet to check, and I’ve reached the conclusion that some people seem to spend all day locked to their smartphones twittering.

giphy

It is always frustrating: if you are an academic, communicating anything in 140 characters is a real challenge, and the danger is that you say things you don’t quite mean – even if you manage to avoid the elephant trap of typing errors, spotting, yes, just a split second too late that you have missed out a crucial letter. Some words are best avoided altogether, given the potential for a single letter slip to lead you into embarrassment.

And yet: I stay there. Partly, my Twitter presence is an aspect of institutional marketing and communications: I will always tweet, retweet or celebrate institutional achievements, and I take every opportunity to project the University. My handle is @Hallam_VC after all.

Secondly, I do find things out on Twitter – I pick up links to reports and papers I would not otherwise come across. My routine is to quickly save things to an Evernote archive, which I have lightly indexed around a series of tags to help me find things later, and I will read them on trains or early in the morning.

This is perhaps the most useful aspect of Twitter – access to things I would not typically or routinely come across.

And I do engage in debate – although less so than I used to. I don’t like to see ideas which are ill-informed or misdirected go unchallenged. But this is, really, a mug’s game: I’ve learnt from Twitter that any idea, no matter how sensible and evidentially grounded, will attract the snorting derision of someone – and you can be pretty rude in 140 characters (you can be very rude in about eight characters, actually).

Don't feed the trolls.

Don’t feed the trolls.

I’ve learnt that no-one really believes that your opinions are your own – they are always traceable back to your role or your job, and I take ever more care about what I say. No Twitter argument is ever really settled, though some tweeters seem determined to simply grind their opponents into submission. I utterly despise the overt bullying, aggression and unpleasantness which it has legitimated amongst too many individuals and groups.

Twitter has its uses, but it is a dreadful time waster and an excuse for lazy or slovenly thinking; and I write that, and then I’ll find a link to a report which forces me to think hard about something I thought I knew well, and I will be engaged again.

My advice? Like any tool, make it work for you, and don’t let it use you. And don’t get hooked.

Professor Chris Husbands, Vice-Chancellor
@Hallam_VC

When the World Cup came to Sheffield

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For a week in April this year, we used Sheffield Hallam’s main Twitter account – @sheffhallamuni – to run a daily give-away, utilising Twitter’s excellent polls functionality. Every day for a week, users could vote in a poll on our timeline for the chance to win a branded hoodie.

Of course, we did it for a reason. We didn’t just have piles of burgundy hoodies lying around we wanted to get rid of. We had an objective: fun.

Okay, that’s over-simplifying it, but it’s essentially right. Organisations do a lot of promoting on social media – ‘shouting’ about this, ‘making some noise’ about that – and they forget that social media is about conversations.

In order to have a conversation with someone, you need to listen to them.

The impetus for doing a give-away came from that simple premise: we wanted to ask our followers a question, and engage them in a dialogue. Specifically, we were interested in our current students, who are our most engaged audience on Twitter. And it coincided perfectly with Varsity – the city’s annual celebration of student sport.

Varsity is a real celebration of student sport in Sheffield, and an opportunity to highlight the sense of belonging among students.

Varsity is a real celebration of student sport in Sheffield, and an opportunity to highlight the sense of belonging among students.

In order for it to succeed, we knew it had to be something fun and conversational, that our followers would want to take part in. We wanted to run it over a few days, to build up a bit of momentum – and for it to feel like an event.

Lastly, we wanted to celebrate the great city that we’re proud to be a part of.

So we came up with the World Cup of Sheffield. For five days, our followers would tell us what they thought was the best thing about Sheffield. And on the last day the final would decide what the best thing in Sheffield was.

So, once again, here are the component pieces of our give-away:

  • fun
  • conversational
  • about students
  • celebrates Sheffield
  • sport theme
  • sustained

What was the goal? Brand affinity. We wanted to have some fun with a very engaged audience – current students – and let them know that we listen to them, and care what they think (and say).

How do you measure something like that? Engagement. You want people to take part . . . and hopefully even have some fun with it.

And here’s what we did. (Disclaimer: I had a bit of help from a small group of students, who came up with some suggestions of what we should include in the polls.)

We cued the competition up, explaining the format before we launched into the first poll. Day one resulted in 132 votes, 69 likes and a couple of RTs. There were no replies, but we learned that our followers really like Tamper Coffee.

On day two we asked our followers to vote for their favourite cinema.

Although there were less votes, there was a slight increase in the number of likes. We started to have some fun with Twitter’s selection of gifs.

Engagement stayed at a similar level on day three, but the conversation started to take shape, and some of the local businesses we were talking about joined in.

Day four was marred by controversy – the topic of gig venues in Sheffield is emotive. Questions were asked.

And things got tense.

The number of votes and likes was a lot higher than previous days. Why? There are a number of possibilities, including:

  • the sustained approach was generating more interest
  • our followers are more engaged later in the week
  • the poll subject was more relevant to our audience
  • all of the above

Friday was the final round of #WorldCupSheff, in which all of the week’s winners went up against each other to determine the Best Thing in SheffieldTM.

And there you have it. A clear winner.

Let’s go back to our original plan:

Fun

Was it fun? Well, we certainly enjoyed watching the poll results come in, and the conversations that developed each day. But let’s look at our total levels of engagement.

During #WorldCupSheff week (17-23 April 2016) we had a total of 56 replies to our tweets, 103 RTs, 10 RTs with comments, and 582 likes. Our total level of engagement (9,108 individual engagements) was a 107.9% increase on the previous week (4,381 individual engagements).

And engagement is a decent indicator of people having fun – it means they’re enjoying your content, and finding it relevant and interesting.

So we’ll conclude that it was fun. What was the next objective?

Conversational

This is straightforward: the World Cup of Sheffield was a conversation. We asked people a question, they told us an answer, and they asked questions of us. And the stats support that statement, with 78% of our posts being conversational during that week, and 22% of them being classed by our social media monitoring software as ‘updates’.

About students

The World Cup of Sheffield was all about students. The branded hoodies, the venues, cafés and restaurants, which were suggested by a small group of students . . . it was a conversation about student life in Sheffield. And a quick scan of the users who liked the posts shows that the most engaged audience was Sheffield Hallam students.

Celebrates Sheffield

From burritos to gig venues, cinemas to café culture, this was all about the Steel City.

Sport theme

It was the World Cup . . . of Sheffield. That’s quite a sporty theme.

Sustained

It ran for a week, and gained momentum towards the end. The length of time it ran for felt right, and it needed a few days to pick up pace.

What did we get out of #WorldCupSheff? Our goal was brand affinity, and a sense of good will among our followers. We eased off on promotion, shouting and making noise, and for a week we had fun, rewarding engagement with daily prizes.

Would we do it again? Definitely. I can see #WorldCupSheff making a return on a regular basis. The investment is minimal, and we ran a week-long brand affinity campaign for the cost of a few hoodies and a bit of staff time.

Would I change anything? Yes, if only to make sure we weren’t repeating ourselves. Getting input from students was really important in making the content relevant, and that’s something we could develop further.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve it next time, leave me a comment, or tweet me.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield