In addition to moving TESOL Arabia internal communications to a more dynamic platform with social media features, Edmodo, the organization has put a lot of effort into improving its presence on social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Over the past 6 months, the number of our Facebook followers grew from 800 to more than 1,300 from 20 countries, with 19% of the fans from the United Arab Emirates, 12% from Egypt, and 11% from Saudi Arabia. We have been using our Facebook page to publish information about TESOL Arabia Chapter and Special Interest Group (SIG) events, other professional development opportunities for teachers in and around the United Arab Emirates, and relevant news items that may be of interest to our members. We are also sharing useful free resources, posting available job opportunities in the region, and sharing photos from our events. Recently, the executive council approved allocating a budget to promote TESOL Arabia through social media, as they realized the importance of these tools in reaching a new type of audience.

TESOL Arabia’s presence on LinkedIn started 2 years ago and currently has 822 members and is increasing daily, with an average 8% weekly growth rate. The site gives an excellent overview of statistics that includes member demographics and information on views and traffic on the group site. Currently 22% of the group’s members are from the United Arab Emirates, 62% have education listed as their function, and 44% of members report being in a senior position.

The LinkedIn platform gives TESOL Arabia the ability to not only communicate internal and external professional development opportunities available to teachers in the GCC<what is GCC> but also to provide the additional opportunity for members to communicate with one another and share their experiences and professional development trials and tribulations. Members can discuss their professional development needs as well as their reflections from events that they have participated in and their development both inside and outside of the classroom.

Although there is some overlap of the information sent out to members on these social networking sites, each platform has its specific advantages and each platform reaches a different sector of both TESOL Arabia members and nonmembers. The microblogging site Twitter is very useful for reaching a more global audience and communicating with educators from a wider selection of disciplines and institutes. This allows members to include the professional organization in their Personal Learning Network and to benefit from information coming directly from teachers and institutes in the Middle East/North Africa region. TESOL Arabia has been using Twitter to promote its international conference for the last 3 years and has recently increased its Twitter use to include professional development information year-round and involve itself in current trends and applications of education technology, curriculum development, assessment, and teacher training. TESOL Arabia currently follows nearly a thousand leading Twitter users, and it has over 2,000 followers: 25.6% from the United States, 18.4% from the United Arab Emirates, and 12.2% from the United Kingdom. Demographic data also indicate that 41.3% of the followers are teachers, 9.8% are teacher trainers, and 7.1% are consultants.

The fact that all three of these platforms serve different purposes and reach different demographics is beneficial to TESOL Arabia and its members in that now there are more ways to receive all updates on the various different aspects of the organization. A fourth platform that we use to tie all three social networking sites together is Slideshare, which gives TESOL Arabia the ability to quickly upload PDF documents, in our case usually an event flyer or call for papers, and to promote it via email membership lists, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in a very efficient and timely manner, giving us the ability to reach all members and the many nonmembers caught in the crossfire of retweets and news feeds in a few seconds. Using Google’s tiny URL creator, we circulate flyers hosted on multiple platforms and get detailed insights about the number of clicks, the sources of the clicks in addition to geographic reach such as this flyer. This free method provides us with valuable information regarding the effectiveness of all the platforms that we use to spread the word about our events and campaigns.

These bursts of social media information promoting TESOL has led to fantastic turnouts at TESOL Arabia events, an increase in new memberships for this academic year, and a noticeable increase in the number of proposals for the organization’s annual conference. More important, TESOL Arabia has achieved an important goal of increasing its ability to communicate with members and facilitate professional development between those members.

To join any or all of the above-mentioned TESOL Arabia social networking sites please visit Facebook, LinkedIn TESOL Arabia Group, Twitter at @tesolarabia.

Rehab Rajab has been involved in professional development activities for teachers in the United Arab Emirates through her work with TESOL Arabia for the past 7 years. Currently she is the vice president/president-elect of the organization. She worked as an ESL teacher for 12 years before becoming a technology integration senior coordinator at the Institute of Applied Technology. She is passionate about sharing innovative teaching ideas and developing online learning communities. She is also an advocate of technology in the classroom and considers herself a lifelong learner.

Daniel Stebbins is an instructional leadership coordinator for the Ministry of Education and has worked for the Madares Al Ghad (Schools of the Future) Education Reform Project since 2007. He currently serves on the Ministry of Education MAG Assessment Committee and is the chair for the Education Technology Committee. He is passionate about leadership, educational technology, and promoting the love of reading among children, students, parents, teachers, and elderly.