Using Twitter to Reach Practicing Professionals.

The Department of Agronomy began using Twitter (@KStateAgron) to deliver information to practicing professionals in April 2012.  Experts in Agricultural Communications were consulted and an undergraduate student in this major was hired to assist.  Defining and serving a specific audience was a critical step.  Many options exist and we selected the practicing professionals as a means to further extend the reach of our extension programs.  A limited amount of department promotion occurs along with live tweeting from field days and student events.  Faculty engagement was limited at first but has settled in on a fairly active core group.  Our initial goals of 2-3 original content tweets per week and 500 followers were quickly exceeded. Formatting changes were needed for electronic newsletters to make them readable on smartphone, tablets, etc. and to link to our radio interviews.  Refining and reformatting content to fit social media are critical.  Tracking of retweets and use of bitly links have been useful in identifying successful content.  We customized our bitly links to start with ksu.ag so readers would recognize our content.  Readership of our electronic newsletter increased significantly with Twitter use.  Crop condition reports have been very successful and information from popular faculty members garners considerable attention.  Also, student success stories have been very popular.  Our audience includes mostly practicing professionals but has significant participation by current students and alumni.