College's Staff Is All Thumbs -- and Proud of It

Twitter Study Declares School 'Most Active' of U.S. News & World Report's Top 100

A new study has confirmed what George Washington University students already knew: Their school officials are obsessive Twitterers.

About 58 times a day, some university staff member sends a message in 140 characters or less, telling students about free depression screenings or flu shots, Foggy Bottom Metro closures, grant application due dates and upcoming lectures ("Jeb Bush coming to campus? You bet!").

Then last week, amid the dozens of GWU-sanctioned tweets, came this one from @GWTweets: "GW named most active college for Twitter use!"

Although Twitter has gained popularity in recent months, it has yet to break into the text-message-crazed teenage and college crowd, according to comScore, a marketing research company that measures online audience numbers. GWU might be an exception, its official Twitter scribes say, citing a growth in the number of active student accounts since spring.

For instance, at a lecture featuring Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates last week, university staffers spotted several students tweeting the event from their iPhones and BlackBerries.

The Twitter study that gave GWU its high ranking was conducted in September by universitiesandcolleges.org, a higher-education Web site that tracks technology trends. The researchers checked the statistics of only the top 100 schools on U.S. News & World Report's ranking of colleges and only counted Twitter accounts that are directly linked to the university administration, leaving out student groups, sports fans and personal accounts of students, professors and staff members.

At GWU, the researchers counted 17 accounts with 7,192 followers. Some of the most popular include the communications department (@GWTweets), the faculty and staff magazine (@GWToday) and the Elliott School of International Affairs (@elliottschoolgw).

Although other schools were voted more popular (Harvard has nearly 19,000 followers) or have more accounts (the University of Florida has 24), GWU was cited for posting the highest number of tweets a day (average: 57.7 daily) and for following the accounts of more than 4,500 other Twitterers rather than smugly just wanting to be followed.

No university has anywhere near the popularity of Twitter's celebrity thought-sharers. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) has 3.8 million followers who were treated to this lofty thought Monday afternoon: "Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

There is always the risk of over-tweeting, of being so annoying that your followers drop you. GWU's Twitterers swear they don't overdo it, sending information followers want to know.

"People vote with their mice," said Menachem Wecker, an electronic communications writer who is in charge of @GWToday. "You get an idea right away if you are tweeting too much" because your followers start clicking "unfollow."

And it's not easy to be a cool Twitterer on a college campus, where most students can quickly spot a lame tweet. At many schools, staff members simply copy and paste news release headlines into a tweet and slap on a link to the full text, or they set up an RSS feed to do it automatically. Wecker said he and other GWU Twitterers have shied away from that route, instead linking to relevant news articles, re-tweeting information from students and constantly sending shout-outs to their followers.

"The time it takes to post on Twitter is the same time it takes to talk to someone," Wecker said. "I don't think there's ever too much time you can spend reaching out to your audience."