scouting ireland on twitter

I couldn't let the year to by without a small post, you know, to get the 2011 date activated in the blog archive! I decided that I'd talk once again about Scouting Ireland and a topic close to my heart, Twitter.

Timeline of Events:
September 2007: I started the @ScoutingIreland twitter account. I planned to use it to publish the news from the website onto twitter.
October 2008: I managed to get the account set up to tweet news from scouts.ie. It took a fair bit of work to figure out how to get the news from the static page to an RSS feed and in turn onto Twitter.
October 2010: New website and RSS feed launched! (Which I blogged about here!) After my hard work, I could change the RSS feed to the official one.
April 2011: I handed the account over to National Office. I was contacted and gave up the account to the Communications Team. Up to this point I gained about 1,300 followers.
April 2011: I set up another account, @IrishScouting and began the process again of pulling the news from the website into twitter. The account provided me (at least) with the official news from the site.
December 2011: @ScoutingIreland (the official account) has about 1,900 followers and steadily growing each day. @IrishScouting (unofficial) has about 80 and not gaining many each week.

I've looked at both these accounts and took a snapshot of that last 3 months to compare how well Scouting Ireland is looking after the account they made me give up. I was promised they had a plan and was told the account would be put to good use as part of the new Communication Plan.

Stats from @ScoutingIreland over the last 3 months:
Total Tweets: 64
Direct news from the website tweets: 15
Retweets from other accounts: 2
Test Tweets: 1
Replies: 1
Random, not official news Tweets: 4
Tweets from Group Leaders Conference: 41

Number of official news items from the website that was not published on their official feed: 22


And yes, those 22 were published on @IrishScouting!