Departments across the university are attempting to create a line of communication with students by reaching out to them through social media.
Housing and Residence Life, the University Police Department and Parking services introduced new Twitter pages at the beginning of the semester.
"We want to be able to keep the university community informed," UPD First Sgt. Rhonda Clark said. "Obviously not on things emergency in nature, but on general day-to-day things we will update. Sometimes we have street closings and things of that sort that we would like to be able to keep students up to date on.
"Things can change last minute and our goal is [to] let students know what's going on."
As of Sunday, Housing and Residence Life has posted 72 tweets, while UPD and Parking Services each had less than five tweets within the past month. UPD has only tweeted and retweeted once, but Clark said it's still in the early stages of development.
While each page has more than 100 followers, the ultimate goal of these social media outlets is to get a steady stream of feedback from the students instead of operating as an informational resource.
"We would love for the students to reach out to us," Clark said. "This is a format that they can use to communicate with us and we know that this is the way that technology is going or has gone. We hope that it will be utilized in such a way."
Though UPD, parking services and housing have just gotten started on Twitter, Ball State University Libraries has maintained a Facebook and Ball State Dining has maintained a Twitter presence for more than two years. Suzanne Clem, marketing coordinator for dining, said the transition to social media sites is essential to success for any group and a good way to maintain a rapport with students.
"We just knew that more and more people were getting involved in not only Facebook, but the college-aged crowd was starting to get in on Twitter too," Clem said. "So we thought, if we're pushing out messages to Facebook, it just makes sense to capture every social media platform that we can."
Even though dining has been quick to utilize Twitter and Facebook, it has struggled to create the two-way communication line that has made the libraries' Facebook page successful.
"Right now, it's just a means for getting little bits of information out there," Clem said. "We try not to overload people, because we know, on platforms like that where you're mostly communicating with friends or other people that you like to follow, you don't really want to be overwhelmed with things about dining, food service and commercial type messages."
Student reaction is still mixed about the effectiveness of university services utilizing social media tools to connect to and inform students, but many feel that is a step in the right direction compared to former tools.
"Something would be nice other than, or in addition to, the emergency email and texting services that the university already provides," senior elementary education major Amanda Pinkerton said. "If there was a way to find out about university related things that aren't necessarily an emergency, then I think that could only be a good thing."
Ball State University Libraries doesn't have a Twitter account, but it does have more than 2,500 Facebook fans. Suzanne Rice, assistant dean for public services, said Bracken Library consistently gets feedback from students and social media could help other departments.
"An opportunity for exchange is always a helpful thing," Rice said. "The trick is to keep things as short and informative as you can. We find that we have more of an affect when we have short messages, bullets and those sorts of things, rather than being extensive and being all things to all people."
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