My Journey to Becoming a Social Media Influencer

Posted on by Michael Ceribelli

PART 1: INFLUENCE

Although I am not active on Twitter I chose to make a separate account to post from for this class. For this reason I started off with 0 followers at the beginning and now have 12. One of the things I found that worked well was when I engaged with other people on Twitter whether that be classmates or someone with more followers like the founder of FourSquare. Some of the back and forth that I had with my classmates allowed other people in the class that followed them to see my account and follow me. While people like Dennis Crowley or Michael Weber gave me access to a slightly larger audience. I received a few followers from these posts that I didn’t have any other connections with, however, I lost the one or two I gained relatively soon after. The things I found that had the smallest and sometimes an even negative effect was where instead of paying attention to my followers I chose to post about things I like and that interest me. So, I found when I posted about things like sports or movies I would lose one or two followers. This taught me about the importance of paying attention to your audience when trying to grow your network. So if I do post things like this I should try to engage with others outside of my network that would appreciate the content more. With this in mind continuing forward I will also make more of an effort to engage with classmates by either replying to their tweets or simply liking them. I will also pay more attention to what kinds of conversations they engage in and try to make sure my tweets are more aligned with that.


PART 2: EXECUTION

*I did not to include my promoted tweet because its natural engagements were lower than my top ten tweets*

Tweet 1:

Impressions: 551

Engagements: 5

Engagement Rate: 0.9%

With this post I was trying to reach outside of my immediate audience of the people in class and comment on something I found interesting. So, I used Twitter Analytics over a few days to find a topic I liked and then commented on it. What’s interesting is that although this is my post that received the most overall impressions it didn’t have a single like or retweet. This lets me know that I made the right decision with the topic, however, the tweet was probably not as well written as it could have been. Maybe including more humor or possibly taking a controversial stance would have made my tweet stand out more and could have lead to more likes or retweets.

 

Tweet 2:

Impressions: 408

Engagements: 7

Engagement Rate: 1.7%

In this post we were tasked with interacting with someone who had around 10K followers that graduated from Newhouse. I happened to be in Newhouse at the time and someone mentioned that Michael Weber was coming to speak. This tweet did better as I received 2 likes and one comment from the man himself. I think this was successful because it was timed right. If he had not been coming in the next week I might not have received a comment.

 

Tweet 3:

Impressions: 375

Engagements: 1

Engagement Rate: 0.3%

With this tweet we had to produce a piece of stock content that could be reposted at a later date and still remain relevant. This is an example of more a selfish tweet. I actually work for the startup so I made this tweet hoping that a few people might see it and check out our social media, I did not think at all about if it would help my following. I think this is why it did well in terms of impressions but did poorly as it had 1 like and 0 retweets

 

Tweet 4:

Impressions: 363

Engagements: 11

Engagement Rate: 3.0%

In this situation I was trying to again expand my network of followers. With the start of the NBA fast approaching I utilized Google Trends. This allowed me to analyze how much people were talking about the biggest teams in both the Eastern and Western Conferences, I included an image of the chart. However, it received 0 likes and retweets. I believe this is because people either did not care about the information because it was obvious or they didn’t understand it. Regardless, the use of tags and popular hashtags are probably why it got so many impressions.

 

Tweet 5:

Impressions: 244

Engagements: 15

Engagement Rate: 6.1%

This was one of my first tweets and as I am not an active user I simply completed the assignment and didn’t think much about my audience or getting any likes or retweets. I think the reason it got a 244 impressions is because I tagged Whitman. Where I went wrong was using a picture of the Whitman Atrium and tagging Whitman. Knowing what I do now I should have taken a picture of student studying outside of the cafe in Newhouse as more of my followers would have related to it. The only like I received on it was from another Whitman student in the class.

 

Tweet 6:

Impressions: 238

Engagements: 5

Engagement Rate: 2.1%

I needed to post a video for this tweet so I chose to take a video in Whitman of some of my friends giving a thumbs up with the hashtag HumpDay. The issue again with this piece of media is that it was Whitman students. A smarter decision would have been to post a video with some Newhouse students that other people in the class would know in a setting that they recognize and relate to. I believe the hashtag is what helped with engagements, the only like again came from one of the the few Whitman students in our class.

 

Tweet 7:

Impressions: 220

Engagements: 22

Engagement Rate: 10%

With this post I was trying to play off of some of the controversy of Kanye by asking people when they thought he would begin commenting on politics again. In this sense it did work as the engagement was the highest I had on any of my tweets. The problem was that people did not agree with it enough and it only received 2 likes. A hashtag or mention of someone like Trump would probably have been more effective.

 

Tweet 8:

Impressions: 206

Engagements: 2

Engagement Rate: 1%

This is another case of needing to finish the assignment and not having a good grip on what drives tweet engagement. I believe it was the fact that you were tagged that caused it to get as many impressions. I should have chosen to do some sort of hashtag to bring it to a large audience. Another option would have been to include some type of media whether that be a video or photo that describes me, which could have been more interesting. I received 0 likes and retweets on this post.

 

Tweet 9:

Impressions: 201

Engagements: 8

Engagement Rate: 4%

This tweet was supposed to be structured to encourage an interaction with Craig Silverman. If I were to repost this I would instead try to challenge him or ask a question directed at him that would have more directly asked for a response. Since most of my classmates were at this event and it did not contain anything insightful or interesting it failed to receive anything more than a like.

 

Tweet 10:

Impressions: 185

Engagements: 5

Engagement Rate: 2.7%

This tweet was made for #FollowerFriday and I chose to again post about something that interested me, hoping that other people outside of my followers would take interest and maybe respond. However, it ended up that Kanye did not drop his album and because again it wasn’t asking for an opinion nor did it contain anything groundbreaking it did not receive any likes or retweets. Part of the problem could have been the way that I edited the three albums to appear next to each other which may not have been aesthetically pleasing.

 

Looking across all of my posts I utilized a number of pieces of technology that we spoke about in class. FollowerWonk was used to continuously analyze my followers mostly to find when they are active and schedule posts at that time. To schedule posts I used Tweetdeck, which was also very beneficial whenever I wanted to find a trending topic or parse through hashtags to find posts with a lot of engagement to respond to. Twitter Analytics was important in giving me the ability to track impressions and engagement. I did not receive many likes, comments, or retweets so being able to track effectiveness through impressions and engagement data became even more valuable. Lastly, I used Google Trends twice. The first time was similar to how Tweetdeck was used as I wanted to see search patterns for albums and where and which albums were being talked about or searched and in which locations. The second time I used it was for my NBA tweet.

 

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