Top 10 tweets from August to December 2015, and more

Posted on by Sreyoshi Dey

The process of trying to curate and choose one’s own Twitter activity and chose the top 10 tweets, is hard, long, tedious. The first hurdle I faced was how to understand which tweets were the best and which not? I sat with my brows knit together concentrating on my profile for long till I thought why not tackle that hurdle with the help of Twitter Analytics.

I realized looking into the Twitter Analytics, that in August 2015, when Fall 2015 semester had just started I barely earned 36 impressions per day on an average. Sad count, I know, even I was surprised. However picking up on the tips and tricks as taught by Prof. Jennifer Grygiel in COM 600, the impressions per day went up to 322 in September 2015. In October the impressions per day count was again up and this time to 883 on an average, but in November 2015 it plummeted down to 248 impressions per day. With the month of December having just started out I did not take that into consideration. However the trajectory over the past month made me reflect on what did I do in the month of October to have had such a high number of average impression.

At this point I will pause and revise what Impressions and Engagements mean. According to Twitter Support:

“Impressions: Times a user is served a Tweet in timeline or search results

Engagements: Total number of times a user interacted with a Tweet. Clicks anywhere on the Tweet, including retweets, replies, follows, favorites, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username, profile photo, or Tweet expansion“

During the month of October 2015, there were two simultaneous things that happened and helped increase the number of impressions I made with my Tweets. First was creating a brand new hashtag, which had never been used before. I used #NewhouseTravel to start a conversation among the Newhouse members about their travel. The endeavor, the very first tweet, earned 19,981 impressions and had 36 engagements. This was undoubtedly the highest I had reached with any tweet over the course of five months. The unique hashtag along with the strong Newhouse population rendered a high amount of engagement as well. The only downside of this tweet was perhaps not including the class hashtag of #NHsmtp.

 

Screenshot 2015-12-01 23.10.41

 

Also introducing new content to one’s profile in the form of GIFs helped to increase engagement level as was observed with the tweet below. While the class was introduced to creating GIF, this was also the time when Facebook brought about the changes to their profile picture where one could have a short video which was similar to GIFs. The following tweet had 128 impressions only, but 26 media views, as in where people actually stopped to see the video, and 15 total engagements. Perhaps it was Jonathan Borden‘s funny dance which worked here.

October was also the month for News Engagement Day and the following tweets as a result had a high impression and engagement level, by using just #NewsEngagementDay and the Newhouse’s unique hashtag of #NHned.

The above five tweets made me realize that instead of just tweeting with words, tweeting with images, GIFs or something new to add to the discussion, like a unique hashtag, rolling through the site is always well appreciated by the Tweeple aka Twitter people and helps to bring in more direct engagement.

Further, when on social media and talking about social media, it is always helpful to keep the ideas fresh and share the trending. The following tweet quoting an AdWeek article about digital media marketing statistics over the previous 9 days helped generate 608 impressions and 4 engagements.

In the month of November when the impressions plummeted, a thorough review of the tweets showed that the tweets during the month of November had no such interactive add-ons like images or videos. They were tweets which had words and the right hashtags leading to engagement, but not enough to cross the October mark. The following tweets made during the NASSS 2015 conference at Santa Fe, New Mexico, generated a high level of engagement. The first was a mention by Prof. Anne Osborne which received 17 engagements, followed by a tweet which looked back at the conference and generated 98 impressions and 10 engagements.

In the month of September 2015, the Top Tweet according to Twitter Analytics was a retweet of Timothy Hughes ‘s promotion of his upcoming conference activities and had 1,275 impressions alone, with 9 engagements. This reflects as to how engaging with an influencer can bring in positive engagement with other users.

This was also the month for Super Blood Moon, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US and major debates surrounding Internet.org by Facebook. A simple GIF tweet at this point generated 176 impressions, 21 media views and 5 engagements.

Almost done with the blog post, I realized that a couple of the tweets mentioned herein did not have the class hashtag. But I also wanted to stick to the points made above. So I returned, recalculated and felt I needed to add 4 more tweets. #NHned was an alternate hashtag allowed for #NHsmtp during that period. So I looked through my profile again and voila, there were more hidden treasures.

Facebook never ceases to be in the news and therefore the news about the social networking site’s spread in Africa caused a definite stir. This particular tweet perhaps because of that very reason had 16 total engagements and 336 impressions.

Ethan Zuckerman’s visit to SU and his amazing talk on digital activism sure had me hooked. Enough to forget about social media beyond this one tweet and yet it had 161 impressions and 11 engagements. Yet again the point of influencers and tapping into the right ones stands.

Rallying against sexual harassment has been a cause that I have always worked upon but never looked at Twitter or social media as a tool in that regard. During the week for tweeting about causes, I chose to tweet about sexual harassment and reflected upon the Its On Us campaign. Inviting the class to be a part of the campaign as well, the following tweet had 8 engagements and 226 impressions. I continue tweeting and talking about the cause with the help of any additional information or resources that I can get.

 

This tweet will be my last but a personal favorite for reasons so obvious. And this had 9 engagements but 234 impressions on Twitter.

In conclusion the message that I carry back from this analysis is, it is healthy to have tweets with one particular stream of content, like focusing one’s profile on to two or three broad streams like in my case – social media, gender and sexuality, travel, animals. But making it richer using infographics, images, videos, GIFs, and tapping into the right influencers is always helpful to market the social media profile in question, like here it is my personal Twitter profile. At the same time it is also important to use less hashtags, but meaningful and important hashtags, to catch the attention of other users and more importantly users with whom we would like to engage. Having a hashtag at every word in the tweet does not help ring in the right engagement and therefore may even lead users to ignore the profile under the impression that the profile sends out confused or convoluted messages.

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