I was looking over the TwitterCounter top 100 and noticed that a mass transit system has made the list.
Bay Area Rapid Transit or BART tweets a few times each day (follow @SFBART) depending on what’s happening. For example, @SFBART will clue you into free museums near BART stops (notice the Target promotion):
5 SF museums including MOMA (all near BART) FREE this Sun. sponsored by Target w/kid-focused activities for families.
as well as provide useful suggestions during special events:
Attn Raider fans, or those who want to steer clear of them: BART expands service to accommodate crowds for Sunday’s game
and will even answer questions posed by direct message:
@Antagonist Hi! Some noise info here: http://is.gd/47Rx ; Some EZRider info here: http://is.gd/1rzk
The most common type of tweet appears to be about equipment outages and service disruptions which seem to have happened every day this week:
10-15 min. delays between Bay Fair and Fremont in the SF/Richmond and Fremont directions due to an equipment problem on the track.
Followers are warned that @BART is not tweeting 24 hours a day, so have a backup plan to monitor alerts which are also available by email or RSS feed via the BART website.
How could BART improve their use of Twitter?
The announcements about special events and service disruptions seem like they could be easily handled with the RSS feeds and email alerts.
One idea would be to use the groups capabilities of Twitter as we have described in prior posts.
For example, BART could set up a group called Sundays with the Family that would direct message group members with notices of special museum exhibitions, street fairs and other ideas for planning an afternoon outing via mass transit. By setting up the group, BART would have an idea of how many people are interested in these types of notices and could also do some polling to better serve the members.
Do you have any Twitter suggestions for BART?
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