Improving University social media presence in Twitter

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Twitter is one of the most prominent social media platforms where the student community and academia engage each other regularly. Conversations range from friendly banter, to academic disagreements, to job postings in the research community.

Having a strong presence in Twitter for a University allows it to have access to a larger, and more diverse talent pool.

To that end, twitter profiles related to multiple universities were analysed and compared to understand the factors that drive a more prolific social media presence, thereby improving outreach to prospective students and researchers.

Contents

1. Insights
2. Data
3. Analysis
4. When do people tweet?
5. How do universities compare?
6. How unique are the tweets for each University?
7. Where are the twitterers located?
8. Who are the most prolific twitterers?
9. Recommendations

Key Insights from analysing the data

There are three key factors to consider when trying to increase social media presence

1. When – There are clear trends visible on when maximum twitter traffic is generated at a given time.
   • The Beginning of Fall season has been observed to contain the most amount of traffic. Likewise, Mondays within a week also have the most traffic.
2. Content – Duplicated tweets do not add value. Having novel content can play a key role.
   • Universities such as Stanford and U.Pennsylvania severely restrict the value of their content by having several tweets that are near-duplicates.
3. Focus – Tweeters that consistently keep their content related to the university can help in maintaining focus on reaching out to potential candidates.
   • Having a high ratio of tweets related to the University vs. Other content can have a large impact.

Data

The dataset was scraped with the help of the University of Chicago's RCC department

Analysis

When do people tweet?

There is significant traffic during the beginning of Fall season across a year, and a significant dip at the beginning of Spring.

This could correspond to the beginning of university classes and Spring break respectively.

When we have a closer look at a weekly level, Monday seems to generate the most traffic, with Tuesday having the least.

How do universities compare?

We try and compare the activity of the University of Chicago vs. the other universities

Stanford has had the highest number of tweets in the last 2 years, followed by Northwestern University.

University of Illinois, Chicago and University of Chicago are very close in volume activity.

Most tweets have a similar distribution in terms of number of characters (length).

Northwestern University is the outlier in terms of having a bi-model distribution, with more emphasis on shorter tweets

How unique are the tweets for each University?

While re-tweet redundancy was filtered out, the study for uniqueness in content of the tweets for each university was assessed as well.

Stanford had the maximum number of tweets that were nearly replicas followed by University of Pennsylvania.

The University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago, proved to have the least number of duplicated tweets in their social media.

Where are the twitterers located?

While the number of profiles for each university vary, the geographical location for the profiles almost always gravitate strongly towards the location of the university

Who are the most prolific twitterers?

We can identify the twitter profiles with the most outreach by looking at factors like -

1. Number of tweets
2. Retweet volume
3. Topic of tweet (about the university alone, or other topics)

Number of tweets

The top 10 most prolific profiles were found based on number of tweets

Northwestern Spyder and Stanford Spyder for Northwestern & Stanford University respectively lead with the most number tweets overall.

Retweet volume

The same profiles do not necessarily come to top 10 if we look at retweet volume

Topic of tweet

Whereas if we look at the ratio of tweets about the university -

Recommendations

1. Neighborhoods in Manhattan offer an ROI with a median of 5.8 years, and containing the greatest number of favorable zip codes
   • The most common property types that help attain this are Condominiums and Apartments
2. Investing in larger properties can increase revenue, as they can accommodate more guests.
   • Rental charge (on a per person level) rises until 6 people are accommodated, and stabilizes after that
3. Spreading investments conservatively over Manhattan as well as Brooklyn can test the waters for occupancy rate and ROI projections.
   • Manhattan is overall more expensive than Brooklyn, however Brooklyn has more Airbnb listings due to its relative affordability.

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