Live Tweeting

Twitter is a great tool that allows people to follow what is happening, especially through hashtags.  For a class assignment at Ohio Northern University (ONU), I had to live tweet an event.  I am not an avid user of Twitter or have ever live tweeted before.  So this was going to be a new experience.  The event I live tweeted was the ONU PRSSA meeting.  PRSSA stands for Public Relations Student Society of America.  For me, it was sometimes hard to keep the tweet under the 140 character limit.  In addition, I used the hashtag of #onuprssa in every tweet so people could follow the meeting if they wished.  Hashtags are a great way to express what is happening at an event to people who could not attend.  This meeting featured Mary Lendzion, who is director of Media Relations at Summit Motorsports Park.  You can check out my Storify for a recap of the meeting.

ONU PRSSA utilizes Facebook and Twitter to keep members and others interested involved.  First, let’s look at the Facebook page.  There was only a tweet relating to the meeting held on Tuesday.  It was a thank you to the speaker for taking the time to present.  In the month of October, there are not too many posts but the month recently began.  In previous months, the meeting date and time seemed to be publicized through this channel.  In addition, the design of this page is really user friendly.  Overall, I think the Facebook page could be utilized a little bit more in the future.  Upcoming regional and national events could be posted there for members to view and like.  In addition, I think Facebook would be a great place for meeting minutes if someone was to miss the meeting and announcements.  The members of PRSSA all probably use Facebook to engage with one another.  By using Facebook more, members could share articles and other news to bring more awareness to their profession.

Twitter was utilized heavily during this meeting.  This makes sense because you can tweet the highlights and key points of the event very easily.  Numerous tweets with hashtags were posted regarding the presenter and what her job entails.  This was done in real-time allowing people who follow the account to keep up with the important aspects of the meeting.  The only thing missing from the Twitter account was a tweet promoting the meeting earlier in the week.  There was no promotional tweet talking about the date, time or speaker.  These details would have been nice so that followers could be reminded of the meeting and what to expect if they did attend.  Overall, the Facebook and Twitter sites for ONU PRSSA are being utilized very well.  I think slight improvements could be made to both in order to increase the effectiveness of the social media channels.