What A Little Bird Told Me: AACE on Twitter

Since last fall, AACE has been working on implementing a comprehensive social media strategy that involves regular postings on the AACE blog, Facebook and Twitter channels. We want to leverage social media to foster communication among the AACE conference attendees, authors, presenters, special interest groups, and organizing committees. The goal is to create engagement that seamlessly reaches the community not only through conference announcements, but also through news, reflections, conversations, debates, trends and reports. We are now starting to see first results of this effort.

Statistics

 

Using tools such as Twitter Analytics and Twitter Counter, we are monitoring our activity and the resulting community engagement. Let’s take a look at some data highlights (December 2014 to October 2015):

• Monthly impressions have doubled.
• Profile visits and mentions have tripled.
• @AACE gained 240 new followers.
• Engagement rates (retweets and likes) have tripled.

Content That Resonates

For an educational organization such as AACE, the return of investment of social media activities is not merely measured in quantitative gains. Much rather, the channel is designed to compile information on a variety of edtech topics and, thereby, offer a focal point for informal learning activities. Therefore, we are most interested in how others interact with the content we provide and how they assess its usefulness. So far, we received promising feedback, for instance, AACE was mentioned among top e-learning and edtech organizations to follow on Twitter by @CapterraLMS. Periodically, we check which tweets create engagement and use this data to inform our content development efforts. The word cloud below visualizes the topics that most resonated with our community.

Top 10 Blog Postings on Twitter

The following blog postings received the most attention on Twitter and via AddThis (impact score in brackets).

1. Top 20 in Educational Technology to Connect with through Social Media (177)
2. Que sera, sera? Predicting Future Trends in Educational Technology ? Horizon Report 2015 (138)
3. How Faculty Adapt their Practices to Teach Online ? An Interview with Donna Murdoch (84)
4. Is It Possible to Learn Anything Online? A Student?s Perspective (79)
5. Learning from Video Games: An Interview with Best Paper Award Winner Eddie Gose (68)
6. Let’s Talk About Flipping: An Interview With Matt Osment (39)
7. What Can Educational Researchers Do to Make Their Studies Replicable? (38)
8. My Personal Top 5 Tools for Teaching and Learning (37)
9. Adventure Learning ? Wearable and Mobile Devices: An Interview with Mary Beth Klinger (37)
10. Informal Learning: New Challenges for Designers and Educators (35)

Further Information From EditLib

This posting introduced different tools and metrics educational organizations can leverage to understand the impact of their Twitter channel. Are you interested in how you can use Twitter in education? Take a look at these open access papers from the EditLib digital library.

Donmez, F.I., Odabasi, H.F. & Erol, O. (2012). Twitter for Collaborative Professional Development. In P. Resta (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2012 (p. 3594). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Kanjanapongpaisal, P., Rogers, S. & Bryan, W. (2012). Twitter Usage in Higher Education. In T. Amiel & B. Wilson (Eds.), Proceedings of EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2012 (pp. 2145-2150). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).