In Case You Don't Already, Follow RAPP on Twitter

I want to share with you a shot of two recent RAPP tweets:

Screenshot of a tweet saying "Many thanks to the RAPPers who help at the promote us at #orientation You ROCK Brice, Jojo, Kevin, Kimmins, Sara, and the SOLs!"

Screenshot of a tweet saying "Check out this new RAPP video - lots of XXVI folks in it! [link] @mickeybjcin @Rated_LEXX"

RAPP has had a Twitter account since this blog started in summer 2009.  That said, it's been a pretty boring, underutilized tool - the blog autotweets* to the Twitter account.  One of my projects for this summer has been trying to use Twitter more for what it can be.

RAPP set up a Broadtexter account for RAPP XXVI to check out and let us know if it'd be a useful tool.  This is a service where people register their cellphone numbers and I can send out text messages to the whole group. We used this send group members meeting reminders - ones that are conveniently sent to their cellphones!

We set the Broadtexter account to send out tweets whenever I sent a reminder message to the group.  That was the first non-blog-related use of the Twitter account.

Shortly thereafter, I went into Twitter and started finding UC organizations and RAPP students - I followed them in the hopes they'd follow us.  As a sign of growth, I'm happy to say we've increased from about five followers to 57 - almost an eleven-fold increase!

I also took the time to learn how to send tweets from my cellphone - having an easy way to send notes of thanks or reminders about RAPP things made me finally use Twitter more.

That brings us to the tweets shown above.  While they're still pretty basic, and while I'm bummed to know I had such a visible typo, they're important steps in RAPP's web 2.0 presence:

The first was the first tweet I sent from my phone and used a hashtag on.
The second was the first where I directed it at people, in this case two people who are shown in the video.

There's still much for me to learn, but I'm working to stay connected with the RAPP community in another key way.

-Rebecca



*In case you're not too high tech, like I am not too high tech, that means that every time a story posts here a link to the blog is sent out on Twitter with the title of the story.