My Profile Growth on Twitter

Posted on by Nathalie Budiman

I essentially only started my Twitter account this semester for our social media class. And I truly started from the “bottom” – zero tweet, zero followers, zero score on Klout. Fast-forward three months later, I now have a modest follower base of 36, a similar Klout score of 34 and a total of 66 tweets posted. The graph below shows the trend of my Klout score from the beginning of February to today.

From my own experience, I noticed very quickly that the best way to increase a follower count is to stick to one specific and consistent personality or “theme”. Most of my “random” followers (those who don’t know me personally) are professionals or students in the field of policy or economic research. The tweet shown below, a shoutout that I gave to two online open source databases used by many economic researchers, actually got me a follow from the director of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (and who’s also an economics professor at the University of Copenhagen)!

Aside from this, I noticed that, unsurprisingly, my tweets get a bump in impressions when I tag a well-known profile (either a company or a person) or more so receive a reply from one of them. Thanks, Chipotle!

The graph below from Twitter Analytic shows my profile’s performance throughout the semester.

Clearly the biggest spike in total impressions come in the month of April, when the class did the promoted viral meme challenge. For that promoted tweet I received over eight thousand reactions, even though unfortunately my meme in imgur itself only receive nearly 400 views.

Aside from the promoted tweet itself though, I actually received the most impressions in total during the month of April. As noted here in my top tweet column show in Klout.

View post on imgur.com

Analytics aside, it is clear that placing rich media in your tweets increase interaction, especially video-based media. The Periscope live post that I did with my friend (who has a larger Twitter follower base than I do), is part of my top ten tweets that received the most attention overall.

I also noticed that posting a highly relevant post to a company or institution, like a picture of the iconic Hall of Languages and bringing it to the attention of SU’s twitter profile, ensures interaction!

And of course, incorporating puppies in any social media content never fails. Never!

Jumping into a relevant movement, for example a specific month’s celebration like the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, also helps bring new people who otherwise would not be exposed to your profile. In this particular tweet, I also tagged the month’s special speaker who came to SU, which brought even more attention to my profile.

Bringing attention to a new observation, for example calling out Facebook’s blatant copying of Snapchat’s famous filters, also brings in interaction to your post. People appreciate well-thought out content that informs them about something new.

Connecting yourself to a community attracts the formation of new weak ties. In the tweet below, I posted hashtags relevant to the Indonesian “foodie” community, and it helped lure people into both my post and profile (I got around two new followers from this post!).

And last but not least, creating an actual interactive post is always an effective way to garner connections! In this Twitter poll that I posted, I should’ve added popular hastags such as #fakenews or #journalismmatters to bring in more eyeballs into my post, since my following base is still quite small.

I am very happy about all the new skills that I have learned throughout my Twitter journey from the past three months, and I will be sure to carry them forward into all my future endeavors.

Leave a Reply