Growing Pains

Posted on by Michael Lehr

Throughout the work in my Social Media Class, my twitter follower count increased from 34 to 115 (+238%). My clout score in the last 90 days increased from 18 to 40 (+122%).

This was no easy task. It took trial and error, a few A/B tests and lots of failed tweets. I found that the tweets that were the most engaging, or attracted the most followers had several characteristics. First, they included some kind of media. This could have been a picture, video or a link with an image. Second, the most successful posts engaged certain groups of people using a hashtag, a mention or discussing an important event. Finally, the unique or quirky content I posted seemed to create the most engagement. The best tweets were ones that people could react to and have an opinion or emotion after reading it.

Some tweets were not so successful. For example, a few tweets tweets failed due to poor timing, but using analytics I tried to avoid posting tweets at times that were not ideal for my follower base. Other tweets I thought were funny or relatable but did not realize that my followers might not have thought the same. This was a learning and growing process for me as I tried to grow up into an adult and professional social media user.

My Top 10 Tweets

#10

This tweet scrapes the top 10 because it is an engaging story about #SocialMedia and coffee, two things that are very relatable to many people. It only racked up 5 total engagements.

#9

This was successful because I reached out to an actual influencer in the world of social media. He favorited the tweet as did people that knew him, it totaled just a slightly better 10 engagements.

#8

This link earned two retweets and 14 total engagements. I did my best to capitalize on the #ICYMI with news from earlier in the week about the new Snapchat spectacles. It used a common hashtag to bring back content that I thought would be very engaging.

#7

The 17 engagements on this tweet came from a few things. First, tagging a friend and Professor Grygiel instantly improves chances of engagement. Also, emojis are something everyone uses but no one really understands, so this tweet had some relatable comedy in it.

#6

And so begins the “second tier” of my top 10 tweets. This tweet had 29 total engagements, and most importantly, a retweet. Retweets are essential to boosting engagement numbers, as simply more people will have the tweet in their timeline. I earned the retweet by posting video content that I created and promoting my blog post.

#5

The 32 engagments on this tweet came through the central hashtag #SUSyria. Creating content surrounding an event that people were talking about a lot allowed this tweet to be more engaging.

#4

I am very proud of this tweet that earned 33 engagements. I captured a moment that created good content for the tweet. Also, I used #SocialMedia, tagged Professor Grygiel and a major U.S. news source. I think I did all I could with this moment to create engagement and gain followers.

#3

This tweet was engaging because it was content I created myself and could be completely creative with. The hashtags helped draw in some audience, but the content itself is what drove the 37 engagements (24 of them media engagements) on this tweet

#2

The top two tweets from #NHsmc both involve other applications outside of twitter. This utilized vine and a common challenge that was very popular. Using a second platform, creating relatable content, and a retweet led to 90 engagements with this post.

#1 THE CHAMP

The content did all the work with my best tweet from this class. Funny, crazy and quirky content goes a long way. That combined with using periscope, good hashtags and a network of twitter users promoting the same content earned 101 engagements.

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