At the recent Digital PR and Coporate Communication Conference I attended, I was surprised to learn that Twitter was the third largest search engine after Google and YouTube (yes forget Yahoo, YouTube comes in at number 2!).
This means a couple of things for those in the education sector:
Firstly, a good Google ranking is obviously important, as is getting to the first page. I've noticed that our schools fare quite well in this regards as a search of a school name and suburb usually brings up the school in first or second spot on Google (usually after the local Parish for Catholic schools).
More importantly, with YouTube being the second largest search engine, those out there wanting to learn more about a particular school will probably also be doing so via YouTube. If school's don't yet have video on YouTube linked back to their website they may well be missing out. Rich, fast-loading, multimedia content is king and this is no exception for the education sector. Video content that schools should be thinking about uploading include online school tours, introductions from the Principal, student eLearning projects and special events. Busy parents who can't make their child's special event would definitely appreciate the opportunity to watch their child's feats through video (of course making sure all privacy concerns are addressed).
Now for Twitter. According to Fleishman Hillard's @ScottRhodie (his Twitter handle), Australians are leaders in social media and are commentators AND creators with a high involvement in Facebook, Twitter, blogging etc. I've set-up @CEO_IW on Twitter to announce school achievements and increasingly many schools are also using it share and build social networks, however Twitter's function as a search engine creates many more opportunities for school's to analyse their 'brand'.
Searching on Twitter will bring up real time comments about a particular issue. I analyse comments on Catholic education to see what is being said and this can be done for individual schools. As an example, a member of the public may use Twitter to search for Holy Cross College Ryde. Hopefully the school's official Twitter account @hccryde will come up, but other tweets with the same content will also be seen. Hopefully such tweets are saying nice things. Regardless of a tweet being positiev or negative, it presents an opportunity for the school to directly connect with the tweeter and engage them.
Plenty to think (and search) about.
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