[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/waynestate/status/32528105927086080"]

After posting the tweet above on February 1st, 2011 we received over 100 retweets and tons of questions looking for details. We replied and pushed everyone to the alert page on wayne.edu (opens new window). We were blown away by the amount of traffic to our twitter account and mentions outside of the actual closure update after the post.

Here are some statistics about the traffic to that status page:

The traffic wasn't just coming from Twitter but everyone was interested in the snow closure. The announcement was placed in the center "alert" area of wayne.edu so it stood out above everything else. We removed the notice at midnight on the 2nd since we were open again on the 3rd as you can see by the graph.

Trending on Twitter

All the retweets and mentions got the attention of  Twitter and they pushed "WSU" to a trending topic in Detroit and we stayed there throughout the evening. Above is a few screen shots of our status through the evening and how our position moved. Trending is really important to us because it is free advertising. Everyone who logs in to Twitter.com from the Detroit area sees our name and it doesn't cost us a thing.

Context around the increase in mentions

Above is a graph of our mentions from Jan 25th to Feb 8th 2011, the big spike in the middle is the snow day. I haven't posted about this yet but we keep track of all Wayne State mentions on Twitter and rate them as Happy, Indifferent or Sad based on the mood of the tweet. The above graph shows the Happy (green), Indifferent (yellow), and Sad (red). As you can see the closure helped push the happy tweets above the sad and helped us spread our twitter account and name to their followers.

Increase in long lasting followers

As a result of all the mentions and exposure we had a healthy increase in followers during the snow day. As you can see above, before February 1st we have a steady increase of followers each day but our exposure really pushed the people following us up to a new high. These followers will now get all future tweets and have the ability to spread our message even further.

Although it wasn't the best publicity in the world it did show the impact of Twitter on the impression of the university. The discussion within our community is important to us and we will continue to monitor and react to it closely. Just as a side note this is not a push to have every department on campus on twitter. We thought you could learn from this small snapshot of our web strategy . If you are thinking of using social media for your department we continue to ask us first, we will work with your to come up with a solid and long lasting strategy.