NU's Purple Presence on Twitter

By Will DuPree
Monday, March 1, 2010
Viewed 651 times.

Northwestern University continues to get out the Wildcat word, but now in 140 characters or less through Twitter.

"If there's something going on that's Northwestern related, then I'll tweet that," Matt Paolelli said. "And that way people see it and engage with it."

Paolelli works as a web content producer at NU. He also created the Northwestern Twitter account in April 2009.

"I created the Twitter account and just kind of started updating and again pushing our stories to our small number of followers," Paolelli added, "and then it kind of ballooned from there."

Paolelli's tweets don't go unnoticed to his 2,539 followers.

"This is 25-hundred people who might not go to our Web site everyday, but they are on Twitter everyday," he said. "If I'm putting the content out there, they're getting it some way or another."

The Medill School of Journalism has also hopped onto the social media train.

"Everything that I post on Twitter is related to either Medill faculty, Medill alumni or Medill students," said Angela Kwan.

Kwan works as Medill's content and publications manager. She links to stories that prove popular with her 653 followers.

"The Innocence Project, a lot of the stuff with David Protess, has been really popular," Kwan said. "The Medill Medal was really popular."

Connecting to content is beneficial, but these tweeters' ideas are an example for the rest of NU to follow.

To receive updates from Northwestern, Medill or NNN, just log onto Twitter and search for @NorthwesternU, @MedillSchool or @NNN_News to get our tweets.