What is a tweet worth?: measuring the value of social media for an academic institution

Determining the influence of organizational Twitter accounts is far from an exact science, although numerous companies (most prominently Klout) have recently sought to find appropriate metrics and algorithms. Klout, a company that measures influence on the social web, recently ranked Syracuse University (SU) as the No. 2 "Most Influential College on Twitter". While at first glance, Klout's ranking presents a flattering portrayal of SU's adept use of social media, we question if the Klout score has real substance, and actually reflects the effectiveness of SU's social media strategy. This paper explores the issue of how one assigns value to a tweet in the context of an academic institution from a survey of SU students on their motivation of Twitter use, behavior, and perception of value associated with a tweet. As users primarily read tweets to obtain interesting information, preliminary findings indicate that users in academic institutions are more concerned with the quality of tweet contents as opposed to how influential the institution is on Twittersphere.