Spring 2018 Social Media Personal Influence Growth

Posted on by Austin Natowitz

Influence

I was not an active participant on Twitter before taking this class, I was on it often, but I would almost never post, and when I did post, I got a maximum of two likes. I began the semester with 43 followers, but they were inactive followers, the occasional spam account, and my close friends mostly. My growth of followers wasn’t enormous over the semester, I added only 26 followers, bringing me up to 69 total (60% growth). However, my new followers are much more active in interacting with my account, and I get more likes and retweets than I did at the beginning of the semester. The thing that worked the most for me in attracting new followers was fairly basic, nobody wants to follow an account that doesn’t post anything, so becoming more active was the #1 thing I did to attract new followers. Another strategy I undertook was commenting under posts of influencers. I’m proud to admit that I am a staunch liberal and an obsessed Star Wars fan, so the influencer’ that I would comment under most of the time was Mark Hamill, I gained a lot of impressions by doing that. What really didn’t work was trying to leverage my work with the Syracuse football team to gain Syracuse fan followers. I also at a point, just started making highlight gifs of the Syracuse Football or Basketball team and discussing what I saw in them, but that never got me more than two likes.

Execution

I made this tweet as we were watching the live broadcast of Zuckerberg’s hearing in class after getting annoyed by how he constantly would preface his comment by addressing the speaker. The only class topic that I used in this tweet was rich media by finding the absolutely perfect gif for this tweet. The tweet gained seven likes (including Lilion!), one retweet, 279 impressions and a total of 14 engagements.

I really need to learn how to smile better, because the more I look at this tweet, the sadder it becomes that I just don’t trust myself enough to smile. This tweet was my first tweet to make it on to the board in COM 427 so I am very proud of it. It uses rich media as discussed in class, including a twitter picture collage which was the assignment for that day as well as using the popular cusefootball hashtag. The tweet gained seven likes, 466 impressions 60 total engagements, 2 replies and gained me four followers, after the tweet was shown in class.

This tweet was part of the viral media assignment and was the most successful one I put out because it was my promoted tweet. Besides promoted tweets, this tweet also used rich media and a twitter card which we learned about in class. The media itself was specifically chosen because I wanted how cute my cat is to suck people into clicking on my link. This tweet gained four likes, one retweet, one quote tweet by someone saying that I was a great person for making the tweet. 1,639 impressions, however, not many engagements only 32, including a terrible only 7 clicks on my link. I discussed why this was the case in blog post 3, that people already saw what they wanted (my cat) so there was no real incentive to click on the link. For this tweet, the class hashtag is one of the responses to the tweet.

Let me preface this section by saying that Bernie Sanders is the most gifable human being on the planet, between this and the wagging finger gif that comprises a good 50% of my gif usage on Twitter. This tweet was made as part of the extra credit assignment commenting under Professor Grygiel’s NYT op-ed. The tweet gained no likes or retweets, but it gained 183 impressions. I think this is one of my top tweets based on the media used, not based on the engagement.

As I mentioned before, I am a huge Star Wars fan, which led to me making this tweet about the google trends of “how to become a jedi”. From class this uses google trends, mentioning a popular page (@googletrends and @starwars). This tweet gained 5 likes, 259 impressions, 18 engagements and gained me one follower from a star wars fan page.

I made this tweet the morning of the COM 427 Midterm asking what people were going to get on their midterm later that day. We had learned in class about twitter polls, specifically with a mention of joke twitter polls where the answer is biased or skewed. The poll got 6 total votes, one like, 183 impressions and somehow only 3 engagements. I don’t understand how that is possible considering that more people voted on the poll than 3, but that is the number that Twitter Analytics is giving me.

My parents are an absolute good luck charm for Syracuse Sports, their record is mentioned above, but it doesn’t go into two of those football games being against top 25 opponents, including #2 Clemson this year, or the fact that Syracuse basketball also won this game against #15 Clemson. From class, I remembered to mention the official @Cuse_MBB page as well as coming up with a unique hashtag, which is not particularly difficult when your last name is Natowitz I also included rich media in the tweet. This tweet gained four likes, (including Professor Grygiel!) 234 impressions and 19 total engagements.

 

This tweet became popular when it was retweeted by the official Otto account. I saw the gif on a list of all mascots on the sports section of the New York Times and decided to use it to tweet at Otto. I also incorporated the march madness hashtag to help the tweet gain more views. The tweet ended with 1,560 impressions, 12 likes, four retweets, and made four people click on my account, two of which followed me. The main class skill that I used here was using rich media and a popular hashtag. However, something that I did not do which we learned in class was not beginning the tweet with an @ because that makes it a reply instead of a normal tweet. For this tweet, the class hashtag is one of the responses to the tweet.

This tweet came before Spring Practice had begun when I was really missing football. The video is a history of the Syracuse Football program from the beginning to last year that I made for a CRS class two semesters ago. The class topics that I covered in this tweet were using a link shortener (bit.ly) as well as evergreen content in the form of the video. History doesn’t change, which makes the video evergreen. The tweet gained four likes, one retweet, 342 impressions and 13 total engagements.

My girlfriend and I like to watch terrible TV shows, one of those shows was “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” which had Steven Schirripa (who was also in the Sopranos and has his own line of Tomato Sauces) playing a completely serious character who’s name was “The Sausage King”. It was so funny that Schirripa became a meme and when he showed up on Last Week Tonight I knew I needed to tweet at him and he liked it! From class, I used the strategies of tweeting @ popular accounts like his and Last Week Tonight’s account while also using one of the hashtags that Schirripa uses the most (#bestTV). The tweet got two likes, 345 impressions, and 10 engagements.

Bonus Tweet:

This tweet was not related to the class, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include it because it is my top tweet of all time. One of my friends (Asef, pictured above) mentioned me in a tweet from a very popular Twitter account centered around the office. The original tweet was focused on Creed (the character above) and how funny he was in the show. The gif that I chose is my favorite Creed moment, and because of the rich media, timing, and tweeting in a response to influencers like we discussed in class, my tweet became incredibly popular. The tweet got 91 likes, two retweets, 12,095 impressions, 470 total engagements, and helped me gain 7 more followers.

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