To identify bots, the Center used a tool known as “Botometer,” developed by researchers at the University of Southern California and Indiana University.
It is important to note that bot accounts do not always clearly identify themselves as such in their profiles, and any bot classification system inevitably carries some risk of error. The Botometer system has been documented and validated in an array of academicpublications, and researchers from the Center conducted a number of independent validation measures of its results.8
My note:
This is another example of blanket statements aimed to bank on buzzwords and fashionable tendencies. Indeed, use of social media is an imperative skill for any educational leader, since it provides a modern venue to communicate with the rest of the stakeholders in the educational process: parents, students etc.
However, the process of social media use in education is rather more complex as presented in this article. e.g.:
why the hashtag use is the one and only altmetric consideration for deep data analysis? The author suggests taking “advantage of an analytic tool to measure effectiveness and participation,” but there is no specific recommendation and the choice of the analytical tool as well as the process of analysis is a science on its own
how educators, as suggested by the author, “want to guide students on comment intensity and type while keeping them on topic”? Indeed, an educator abiding by constructivism will facilitate and guide, yet there is a fine boundary between facilitating and dominating the conversation with “guidance.”
The most useless suggestion in the article:
“For administrators, Twitter chats also provide an opportunity to gain student and parent perspectives while giving them more voice in what’s going on within a school or district.”
Are administrators willing to yield that power to their constituency? What does the current research on educational leaders’s attitude reveal regarding their willingness to engage in such open (and difficult to control) discourse? How is such attitude to be changed: this is missing in this article.
What is your approach to the institutional use of social media at your school?
the institution announced it will no longer archive every one of our status updates, opinion threads, and “big if true“s. As of Jan. 1, the library will only acquire tweets “on a very selective basis.”
The library doesn’t say how many tweets it has in its collection now, but in 2013, it said it had already amassed 170 billion tweets, at a rate of half a billion tweets a day.
Tweets can now be longer, too: This fall, Twitter rolled out 280-character tweets to most users across the platform.
Another issue: Twitter only gives the library the text of tweets – not images, videos, or linked content. “Tweets now are often more visual than textual, limiting the value of text-only collecting,” the library says.
The library also has to figure out how to effectively manage deleted tweets, whicharen’t part of the archive.
Twitter is updating its top search results so that tweets will be ranked based on relevance instead of by time, bringing those search results in line with what users have experienced on their timeline for the past 10 months. Based on early trials, the company claims there has been more engagement in search results and tweets, with more time spent using the service.
In February, Twitter announced that it was shaking up the user timeline for everyone. Previously, it had offered the algorithmic change as an opt-in program, but it became mandatory a month later. The effort was intended to make the service more appealing to new and casual users,
Twitter’s search was broken into various categories, such as most popular or the latest (a live stream), and segmented by people, photos, videos, and more. Now it appears that there’s one more signal being used to algorithmically control how at least the top tweets are shown to you.
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more about Twitter in this IMS blog
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > Post Types to review the engagement by the type of content you posted (post, link, image, video). On Twitter, you can see a snapshot of each post you’ve made by going to Settings > Analytics > Tweets.
#2: Fine-tune Your Posting Schedule
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > When Your Fans Are Online. For Twitter, you can use a tool such a Tweriod to find out when the bulk of your followers are online.
#3: Inform Your Messaging
On Facebook, open the Ads Manager and go to Audience Insights. On Twitter, you can check your audience data by going to Settings > Twitter Ads > Analytics > Audience Insights.
#4: Boost Your Engagement
On Twitter, go to Settings > Analytics > Tweets and take a look at which post topics get the most engagement. On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > Post Types and then switch the engagement metrics in Facebook to show reactions, comments, and shares for each post rather than post clicks or general engagement.
Over the past few years, Twitter’s status as a platform for public debate is a dog-whistle platitude that has become the gilded shield of First-Amendment-waving journalists everywhere, like our very own #NotAllMen hashtag, to justify the mishandling – and, in some cases, even endangerment – of our sources for digital stories (and, yes, tweets should be considered sources).
