Setting up Tweetdeck and Google Alerts for news stories
A step-by-step guide on setting up Tweetdeck notifications and Google Alerts to stay on top of news at your college.
Setting up Tweetdeck
Whenever something happens our first reaction is to share it on social media. People will tweet about things happening to them but also things happening around them. Tweetdeck brings all things useful about Twitter in one place. It’s the college news world’s latest and greatest gift — especially at schools who tweet a lot.
You can use Tweetdeck to track lists, follow specific people at your college, track a specific search term, etc — it’s completely up to you to find what’s useful to you.
To track a list of people who go to your college using Tweetdeck
Login to twitter.com
Search for students who go to your college with keywords like ‘COLLEGE ‘20’
Do this for all the ‘class of’ years.
Select ‘People’.
If you can tell a user goes to your school (because they literally say it in their bio), click the ‘settings’ icon next to the follow button.
Click ‘Add or remove from lists’. Add them to your college list.
To have enough to work with you should add at least 100 people to a twitter list.
Download Tweetdeck to your desktop.
You can use Tweetdeck on your browser but it’s easier to download it straight to your computer.
Add your list to the dashboard.
Click the ‘settings’ icon to turn alerts on.
Track tweets and break news.
Setting up Google Alerts
Google Alerts lets you choose a specific word or phrase to get news article updates from other sites. This is very useful for finding out stories about your university you weren’t aware of yet.
You can choose to get an alert sent to your email every time a new article comes out, but the most useful way to use Alerts is the Daily Digest option, which will send you one email daily at any time you choose with all the alerts you’ve set up.
Most of the time you’ll find really useful news stories to rewrite or find a different angle to report on them better. (Other times you will just get a bunch of apartment options near the college to choose from if you were interested in moving)
Go to: https://www.google.com/alerts#
Create alerts
As a Campus Editor or News Editor the most useful alerts to set up are:
COLLEGE NAME e.g. ‘Ohio State University’
COLLEGE NAME + student e.g. ‘Ohio State University student’
COLLEGE NAME ABBREVIATION e.g. ‘OSU’ or ‘OSU student’
Set up a digest
Click on the ‘settings’ icon in the right hand corner of your list of alerts.
Tick the box that says ‘Delivery time’ and choose a convenient time to get an email with your updates. Tip: Set it for the morning so you can catch up on news and get stories out the rest of the day.
Tick the box that says ‘Digest’ to receive all alerts in one email.
Get a daily alert in your inbox
