Follow (me and) my guide to successful Social Media Handles

Posted on by Elisa Oberst

FACTS

First of all we want to start out with plain facts. To measure my influence on social media I’m using my Twitter follower growth and my Klout score. The so called Klout score is a number between 0 and 100 that displays our social media influence. The higher the score, the better. My Klout score varies between 42 and 43 at the moment, which is great, because a Klout score over 40 definitely indicates a solid social media performance. My score didn’t change significantly during the semester, which I think has to do with my Instagram handle. I’ve always been very active on Instagram, but it still increased a little bit due to my higher Twitter activity.
During the semester I gained 39 new followers on Twitter, which didn’t sound a whole lot to me it first, but when I calculated my growth percentage my profile grew a whole 40%, which is a lot more than I had expected.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

All in all I found it interesting to see which of the techniques we learned in class, actually work (or don’t work) in the real social media world. Of course these vary from platform to platform, but as I personally concentrate on Twitter and Instagram, I want to explain what worked best for me and my content there.

TWITTER

Twitter lives from its short 140 character statements (even though by now the character count is up to 280 per post, but as we have learned in class: social media develops and changes FAST!). For me big hashtags that are „a thing“, like #ICYMI or #FollowerFriday worked very well. This also leads us to another point that worked really well for me regarding gaining reach. Mentioning important personalities in tweets (e.g. in #FollowerFriday tweets) can get you a like or even a retweet in which you’ll profit of their enormous follower count and reach. One other thing that got a lot of engagement was rich media. Rich media means pictures and videos that catch your followers eye in their timeline. One of my best performing posts was a collection of pictures of different outfits I was wearing during a citytrip. I also put matching hashtags with it and voilà it got a lot of engagement. One other thing that worked surprisingly well was creating so called stock content, even after retweeting my stock content tweet a month after the original post, it still got new engagement.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram lives from its rich media, meaning engaging visuals, like pictures and short videos. As I’ve been very active on Instagram for quite a while, I thought I already knew how to get the most of engagement out of my posts, however I was still learning new methods to draw my followers’ attention. What works best for me first of all are engaging pictures, as simple as it may sound the prettier the picture, the more the engagement — at least regarding likes. What I have experienced differently than discussed in class was the length of the caption. I usually see a lot of engagement when I write a very personal and long caption. I sometimes do that and I might even ask my followers a question or for tips and recommendations about different things, which then will get me a lot of comments most of the time.
Another thing that works really well is mentioning the location your post relates to. Especially on Instagram and with Instagram Stories this draws attention from a lot of random to your posts. Once on your feed they might stay. Another thing we talked about in class were Emojis. Emojis might make the content you create more appealing to your existing followers, but I haven’t experienced them to be helping to draw in new audience.

THE HASHTAG GAME

The most important thing when promoting content on either platform is to add the matching and trending hashtags regarding the topic of your post. It’s always good idea to search for related hashtags with the most engagement in the particular field you’re active or your post is talking about.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Below I’m listing ten different social media posts throughout various platforms, that I thought worked really well to gain followers and get followers and not followers engaged. They’re not in a specific order, but I’ll explain what I did and why it worked.

#1

As I said before I find that long, personal captions do work really well for me on Instagram. In this post we were assigned to use a minimum five hashtags. I also added a location to the post to make it easier for people that don’t already follow me to see my thoughts on 9/11 and the Memorial Museum in New York City.

That day my mom had a friend from Hamburg over. She knew her from school, but we didn’t see her very often. That day she’d brought her son. I was playing with him in the livingroom. Our moms had coffee. The tv was on and suddenly the program changed: There were these skyscrapers, a plane, smoke. Until today, I didn‘t realize what 9/11 actually meant and means for the United States. Today I stood there, where once the twin towers used to stand. Hearing the stories of those who lost their lives and seeing what and who they have left behind made me burst into tears. I was 5 years old on September 11th 2001. It was the day I realized there are bad people in this world. Who cares if someone‘s black or white, believes in a god or doesn‘t believe in anything? There‘s no right or wrong way to live life – we‘re one world and the only thing that doesn‘t belong here with #us is #terrorism. To be honest the incidents that seem to happen all over the world recently seemed so far away from me, but today I realized I don‘t want anything like 9/11 happen again – to anyone anywhere. #justsaying #spreadthelove #peace #latenightthoughts #usa #travelblogger #9112001 #911 #nyc #newyorkcity #newyork #911memorial #NHsmc

A post shared by e l i s a 🎀 (@elizavanderwoodsen) on

 

#2

Even for what I’m used to see on my profile this post performed outstandingly for me. I also added the location to draw other students’ attention to my profile. Another thing I did before taking and posting this picture was evaluate my followers’ interests via squarelovin.com. I found out they enjoy fashion and outfit pictures, so I posted another one of these.

 

#3

Obviously what always works is money. For our viral content challenge I promoted my self created meme on Twitter via Twitter Ads. I spent $5 on it and it performed really well and gained a lot of expressions. Unfortunately though not as much as engagement as I wanted it, but see for yourself:

 

#4

Another thing that’s just new to the social media world, but I personally find very fun and helpful are (definitely Instagram Stories in general, but also) Instagram Story polls. I usually see a lot of engagement when doing a poll. I mainly think because it’s so easy to interact with content by just clicking one of the two options you are given right in top content. You don’t have to think about an answer or go from page to page. In this example I asked my followers to help me pick a top to go with my new pink pants.

 #5

As I mentioned above I saw a lot of engagement when adding major Hashtags to my Tweets that eeeverybody uses. An example is my first #FollowFriday tweet. Why #FollowFriday works really well in my opinion is, because you’re mentioning other (preferably big) handles and draw their (and their followers’) attention towards your post and handle. I even got Taryn Brumfitt (she’s head of the #ihaveembraced movement and has almost 8.000 followers) to retweet my tweet, which was a great success.

#6

What really surprised me is that my stock content post, which I chose to be my favorite fall recipe, got so much engagement even after tweeting it out a second time a month after the original post.

#7

Rich media is always a good idea. If it’s combined with your followers interests, that you can find out via Twitter Analytics it will get you engagement in no time. Maybe also because visuals are not language bound. For me and my fashion and travel interested followers this gallery of my outfits during my trip to London was the perfect content. As you can also see I retweeted my own tweet after a while, because I noticed it performed great and wanted to see if I the same content could accomplish a good performance a second time.

#8

Creating an unique Hashtag helped me and my followers. You want to make sure it has to do with your followers interests which in my case is fashion and travel. I also used it over both of my main platforms, like Instagram and Twitter. Even when I first introduced #elizavdwtravels my post saw engagement and got various travel handles to follow me.

#9

While looking at my Top Tweets in Twitter Analytics I found what gets you engagement is also being mentioned in tweets. This doesn’t necessarily have to do with self created content, but is a great way to network on social media in order to get more traffic on your handle’s site. I was mentioned by The News House (remember rich media? that’s exactly what they did here by sharing a GIF with the link to my article)and also by a clothing company called &otherstories, which both definitely have more followers than me. This is another way to gain reach: By tweeting out to major influencers or companies, that then might engage with you and again draw their audience’s attention towards your handle.

#10

Finally what worked surprisingly well was using Hashtags that are dedicated to charity or simply activism (actually even the hashtag #activism is a big thing on Twitter). I saw a ton of engagement when tweeting out suggestions on how to reduce waste. I also made sure to include as many relevant hashtags to that specific topic as possible, and voilá here we are ..

P.S. With this you can not only gain reach, but also contribute to a great movement and address issues you really care about very easily.

 

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