With the prevalence of Smartphones, affordable phone plans, and texting, social media is quickly becoming one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to inform the masses. There are several tools that aid in the creation and maintenance of your online presence; implementing these tools correctly can provide make a big difference. But even more than that – they are simple to use and something that students are already familiar with or using. The correct use of social media will allow students to connect and share in a way that can make the course content more dynamic and engaging.

Facebook Fan Pages

If you have children or have walked through a campus library, you realize how prevalent the use of Facebook is. For the majority of students, Facebook is the social hub; it is serves as a homepage for both their browsers and lives in the symbolic sense. It only makes sense that if you need to inform them, you would do so where they have a higher probability of seeing it. The benefit of using a Facebook page is that you can leverage the communication tools of Facebook without having to “friend” or access student profiles. A great resource for customizing and extending your Facebook Fan page is here.

Twitter

Twitter is quickly becoming the go-to source for relaying and receiving news and informational updates. It is free to create an account, and most major phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Droid) have an application that can receive Twitter updates. Since Twitter is SMS based, you can also update and manage alerts via text messages.  Desktop programs, such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, provide easy-to-use interfaces that have all the functionality that is required for managing your Twitter account. Students are able to follow the account and receive updates, but you do not have to follow them back and receive their feed. Yet again, this protects their privacy but enables them to still have access to the full functionality of your Twitter profile.

Twitterfeed.com

Twitterfeed.com is a free site where you can have RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, such as blog posts, automatically posted to a Facebook page or Twitter account. This could also be used to identify pertinent information for your students. For instance, if you are teaching a Political Science course, you may want the politics feed from CNN to be sent to your accounts. This will be advantageous in two ways. First, it will create value for your account – students will realize the benefit of ‘liking’ your Facebook page and ‘following’ you on Twitter. More importantly, it allows you to post dynamic content without having to add outside feed manually to your accounts. Through the integration of Twitterfeed into course content, these external sources may generate ideas for a new discussions or activities. Connecting your course content to the real world helps make the information more relevant to your students and gives them better context for course-specific activities and discussions. Twitterfeed works automatically and keeps both of your accounts continuously updated without you having to do anything after initial setup. Through the use of this web tool, students will be more receptive when you are posting course-specific materials.