Danegeld

The UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE), one of the Higher Education Academy’s 24 subject centres, supported learning and teaching in law across the UK for over 10 years. Funding for the centre was discontinued from 1 August, although discipline-based support continues.

I was employed by UKCLE from 2001-10 (with one brief break), and have kept a close eye on activities ever since. One interesting development was the creation of a UKCLE Twitter account, @HEA_UKCLE, now @HEA_Law. UKCLE’s review of Twitter usage in its first year sparked off the idea of my own review, bringing in some of the ideas and tools I have come across since I have been on Twitter. Thanks to Michael Bromby (@m_bro), the new law discipline lead, for giving me the go-ahead to probe his data!

Looking at the numbers

In addition to Michael’s review there are two main sources of statistics for the account:

• Summarizr statistics - generated from the @HEA_UKCLE TwapperKeeper archive (Jan 12: TwapperKeeper now closed, but summary still available)
• TweetStats

The three sources do not always agree and metrics are not always comparable, however broad trends are much the same.

According to Twitter itself, @HEA_UKCLE tweeted 385 times between 13 April 2010 and 20 July 2011, an average of around 24 tweets a month or two per day. TweetStats’s timeline shows peaks in March and June 2011, perhaps reflecting periods of high offline activity.

Michael’s review, covering tweets up to 12 April 2011, found that 19% of tweets were retweets. TweetStats has a higher % of retweets for the full lifetime of the account, nearly 33%, with replies at nearly 5%. Summarizr states that 8% of the tweets were @replies or mentions.  Of the top 10 recipients/mentions, eight received only two replies/mentions.

Mugh of the above points towards a Twitter account used for dissemination purposes rather than as a conversational tool. This may well tally with the aims in setting up the account, and is probably also a reflection of the low number of the centre’s key target audiences who are on Twitter.

What about the content?

Michael’s 12 month review found that 31% of tweets were fed automatically from UKCLE’s blogs, news feed and Slideshare account. TweetStats finds that this figure has now fallen to 21%.

Summarizr’s most tweeted URLs are dominated by UKCLE activities. The top five words (law, RT, UKCLE, legal, conference) and top five hashtags (#followfriday, #ff, #nlsf, #bileta2011, #ukcle) taken from TweetStats are likewise largely UKCLE focused.

A more qualitative look at two subsets of UKCLE tweets gives a more nuanced picture. A Keepstream collection of UKCLE’s #ff tweets shows a broad range of stakeholders and subject areas, while the National Law Students Forum tweets serve to illustrate the depth of activity tweeted.

The legal education community

UKCLE has over 400 followers and follows nearly 450 accounts. Nine lists have been set up, however these do not claim to be exhaustive.

Michael’s review segments these followers into three broad types – higher education institutions (such as law schools), bodies corporate (mainly law firms and publishers) and individuas (including both academics an students), but states that no further analysis has been undertaken as yet. A quick look at UKCLE’s Mentionmap reveals some interesting connections. Tools to further analyse the community around the account range from FriendorFollow to Martin Hawksey’s Export Twitter followers Google spreadsheet or a full visualisation – see Tony Hirst’s  Twitter follower map.

The nine Twitter lists include UKCLE’s key target audiences:

• legal academics (28)
• law schools (25)
• law librarians (14)
• student law bodies (11)

Given that there are around 100 law schools in the UK these totals seem quite low, but may well be a fair reflection of Twitter penetration.

A balanced Twitter account?

It would be interesting to compare UKCLE’s account with other Academy subject centre accounts – this pattern of Twitter usage may be the norm and is a useful reality check for those more immersed in social media. However, an article on 10 reasons you’re not getting followers on Twitter stated that:

The ideal Twitter profile should consist of about 30% conversational @replies, 30% retweets and 40% interesting broadcast tweets, hopefully with an opinion or link, of which only about 25% (10% of total tweets) are self-promotional. This tells me that a) you’re trying to add value, b) you’re reading others’ content, and c) you’re conversing and aren’t all “me, me, me”.

In order to exploit the potential of Twitter more fully I have three suggestions, aimed at engaging further in the conversation:

• make more use of hashtags, particularly those in common use by other law tweeters – see for example the #lawblogs community
• initiate a chat on a topic of broad interest once a month (ideally not confined to those with Twitter access)
• use Keepstream or similar tools to curate Twitter and any other social activity as a longer term resource

Related articles

• You Are Not Alone – You Do Not Live In A Vacuum (ukwebfocus.wordpress.com)