Personalizing twitter communication: an evaluation of ‘rotation-curation’ for enhancing social media engagement within higher education

ABSTRACT

Social media content generated by learning communities within universities is serving both pedagogical and marketing purposes. There is currently a dearth of literature related to social media use at the departmental level within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This study explores the multi-voiced interactions of a UK Psychology department’s ‘rotation curation’ approach to using Twitter. An in-depth analysis of a corpus of 4342 tweets by 58 curators (14 staff, 41 students, and 3 guest curators) was carried out using a combination of computer-assisted and manual techniques to generate a quantitative content analysis. The interactions received (e.g. retweets and favorites) and type of content posted (e.g. original tweets, retweets and replies) varied by curator type. Student curators were more likely to gain interactions from other students in comparison to staff. This paper discusses the benefits and potential limitations of a multi-voiced ‘rotation curation’ approach to social media management.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• Twitter
• learning
• higher education
• engagement
• marketing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the curators and followers of the academic departmental Twitter account and those who continue to support the ‘rotation curation’ approach. No funding was received to carry out this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the higher order group analysis, ‘other’ was removed given the uncertainty around who belongs to the anonymous and unidentified stakeholder groups.

2 Students received 745 interactions on non-retweeted content (i.e. original tweets and replies) but staff had only sent 42.7% as many tweets. 745 × 0.427 = 177 tweets.