25 Reasons Why Our Students Tweet

As many people do, I have a love hate relationship with Twitter (and other social media platforms – no lie). I resisted Twitter for the longest of all the major social sites. I thought it was infantile, a waste of time, just one more thing that I didn’t have time for, and a few other groans. I don’t NOT think those things anymore but given that I needed to be well versed in the world of social media as an applied communications instructor, I thought I better get on board and up to speed.

As I began to talk to others about whether or not they used Twitter, I found the same kind of feelings and responses, which puzzled me because obviously somebody (lots of somebodys) were enamored, diligent, and had expertise in using 140 characters to accomplish some kind of goal. I eventually came up with a few reasons of my own to stick with the platform, but I wanted to find out from post-secondary students their reasons for using this particular medium.

Here is what they said in no particular order (with a few of mine thrown in). By the way, the list includes thoughts about use of #hashtags and @handles in messages as well. The examples are theirs 🙂

  • Short updates on daily life for self image
  • Follow particular interests
  • Interact with specific personalities (more likely than other SM to get a response)
  • Be in touch with priority info (road closures, missing people, etc)
  • Learn of updates to other social media, links from specific users/personalities
  • Get news headlines
  • Engage with opinion leaders from your career field (i.e. business)
  • Find out what is going on in a particular location/friends (i.e. free food for students)
  • Follow reactions to big events live
  • Follow events in real time (sports, the Oscars…)
  • Mark/remember items to go back to
  • Create connections between ideas on a certain topic
  • Collect items to see full picture of event/topic
  • Create engagement/personal connection
  • Generate interest in business or topic
  • Bring awareness to situations/events
  • Create trends
  • Know what is trending
  • Post script that explain your purpose for a particular post (image, silly stuff, jokes, games)
  • Make sure specific person sees a particular item
  • To spread the word about an idea, business, event…
  • Create connection among your followers
  • Know what is going on around the globe
  • Connect to other members of an organization involved in
  • Because it has great versatility on a smart phone

Wow – now that is a great brainstorming session. What are your uses?

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Dr. Marcella LaFever (University of New Mexico, 2005) is an Associate Professor in the Communications Department at the University of the Fraser Valley. She specializes in intercultural communication and brings that expertise to various subjects such as communication for workplace, instruction, social media, team and public speaking contexts.