Our team at Inigral uses Twitter to curate the latest news from social media, new technology, and how it applies to higher education. And it’s great for keeping up with the top developments. But if you follow a lot of people it gets a tad unwieldy. So we’ve decided to leverage Twitter Lists to manage the workload more efficiently.

A Win for Inigral’s Marketing Team

When our marketing team would log into CoTweet, it was typically a waste of time. Not that the people we followed weren’t tweeting about interesting things. It’s just that it’s difficult to browse those tweets efficiently when you’re following 800 people. So we are currently conducting an experiment to curate lists for each of the departments that our company is interested in. Rather than combing through the tweets of 800 people (90% of which are not in First-Year Experience departments), I can now go to our nifty Student Life Twitter list, and get targeted tweets on that topic.

A Win for Higher Ed Staff and Faculty

Twitter Lists are also great because they provide great exposure to people who we are following. When we used to follow 700 people, it was unrealistic to expect someone to comb through dozens of pages to get a feel for who is who in higher education on Twitter.

Since Lists are available to public view, anyone can visit http://twitter.com/inigral/student-life to see the Student Life champions that Inigral thinks are important. Before this, people would have had to comb through 800 folks to find Ed Cabellon, Eric Stoller, or Pete Pereira. And trust me, there are people who want to discover the who’s who in each college department. We just want to make it easier.

(Sidenote: We made a conscious decision not to make a list called “social media”. As ironic as that sounds, we felt it just wouldn’t be productive, nor accurate. The truth is that every department on campus is involved with social media now. And from an organizational perspective, we will need to start to rethink what each of our departments means as the dust from the social media gold rush continues to settle. Rather than it’s own department, it is becoming a thread inside of each department – allowing people to begin to focus on their department’s business goals, and how social media will help them accomplish those goals, as opposed to how their department’s business goals can justify their use of social media. More on this topic to come.)