Top Ten Schools/Programs of Social Work on Twitter

Remember the old Top Ten lists from Late Night TV? I remember loving some of those lists and since I have been engaged in some research to understand how Social Work Programs use Twitter, I decided to go ahead and create my own Top Ten list of Schools or Programs on Twitter. But first, you should know that I currently have this list under review for publication with a journal and that this list could be subject to change over time given the shifting variables or factors embedded with my methodology. This begs the questions, What was my methodology?

Well, I utilized some of the principles from Data Science to gather over 26,000 tweets during the period of 2017 to 2018. I follow all, at least I think it’s all, of the social work education programs and schools on Twitter. The list below is not indicative of all programs currently on the list because some have just joined Twitter. I think the list still has merit given my methods because newer programs on Twitter have not yet gathered the number of followers and other factors used to create the list. After downloading all the tweets, cleaning and organizing the data set, I ranked each program/school based on a composite score of 1 to 100 that I created from key metrics like number of followers, number of likes, how many Twitter users each program follows back, most @ replies, greatest use of the hashtag (#) in tweets, and overall number of tweets included in the sampling period. I get that it’s not perfect, but David’s research from the home office probably wasn’t perfect either 🙂

So…without further adieu.

Top Ten Social Work Schools and or Programs on Twitter! 

I know there are more than 10 programs represented and I was a little surprised to see a tie at numbers 6 and 9. However, the top schools on this list have a couple of things in common. First, they are active on Twitter and do a fantastic job of engaging with their online communities. For example, U. of Buffalo consistently engages in the #MacroSW Chats and thus has a lot of tweets under their profile. Second, the top schools have a lot of followers but they also follow back, which can be a good indicator that they understand how to use Twitter to build relationships. I will save the rest of the interpretation for until my article is published, fingers crossed 🙂

Let me know what you think or if you have any questions. Of course, you can always follow me on Twitter. Thanks for taking the time to read through this post and stay tuned as I hope to update this list within the next year.