Behind The Influence: My Semester On Twitter

Posted on by Lauren Witonsky

Influence:

From January 17th to April 18th 2018, my Twitter following grew by 48%. I started with 44 followers and ended with 65. I also increased my Klout score from 30 to 35. While some of my new followers came from the content I was posting, the majority came from who I interacted with. As someone who seldom used my own Twitter account before this class, simply following friends and classmates also bumped this number up. I definitely worked my strong ties, but could have better engaged with weak ties in my network to end with more followers. As for influence, I believe my Twitter presence was more impactful when I honed in on what interests me – wellness. Initially, my homework assignments were all over the place, but eventually I found a way to incorporate wellness into most posts which made my feed more cohesive. Going forward, I would really like to develop a stronger voice to talk about my interests.

Execution: 

  1. Impressions: 4,124, Engagements: 48, Link Clicks: 57

This post shows the power of promoted tweets. With just $5, I gained almost double the impressions of any other tweet. The Twitter Website Card also provided rich media, while the strategic image crop made people want to click and read the rest of the meme.

2. Impressions: 2,859, Engagements: 79, Media Views: 385

Creating my own gif helped boost engagement on this post, including a retweet from the recipe creators. As well, people using #vegan are very active on Twitter, which lead to the most amount of likes I’ve ever received on a single post.

3. Impressions: 2,786, Engagements: 61, Hashtag Clicks: 2

Tagging a lot of influential accounts significantly helped increase visibility on this tweet. Also, the practice of live tweeting during a major event made this a timely and relevant contribution to an ongoing conversation.

4. Impressions: 1,302, Engagements: 39, Profile Clicks: 14

Tweeting out a call to action not only helped us gain views on our Periscope, but also got people excited to engage. As well, using a new medium, live video, piqued my follower’s interest enough to tune in.

5. Impressions: 589, Engagements, 84, Media Engagements: 48

This was an instance where working my strong ties led to success. By tagging my close friends, I instantly gained 4 new followers. The candid pictures certainly helped as well.

6. Impressions: 480, Engagements: 16, Profile Clicks: 2

Using a popular meme format was a way for me to inject personality into my first class tweet. While the engagement was lower due to less followers at the time, I believe the likes I got were from using a clever and conversational voice.

7. Impressions: 451, Engagements: 49, Media Engagements: 28

Social media IRL had to be one of my favorite exercises, and this interesting perspective combined with rich media led to high media engagement.

8. Impressions: 271, Engagements: 9, Hashtag Clicks: 3

After looking at Google Trends and discovering that green smoothies are currently more popular than green juices, I decided to conduct my own research. Creating my first Twitter Poll was a simple way to both engage my followers in the #drinkyourgreens debate and confirm my findings.

10. Impressions: 224, Engagements: 45, Link Clicks: 37

To wrap up, I wanted to showcase my all-time favorite tweet. Creating a Twitter Moment brought social media offline when my roommate was so impressed she had me teach her how to create her own IRL. It also helped me find an entire community of people that love Schine Quesadillas as much as I do, which led to my post being retweeted and called “the most culturally relevant Twitter Moment to date.”

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