For the past 4 months I have been using Twitter more than I have in the past 4 years. At first I felt like I was blindly putting things on the Internet and I didn’t really see the point of Twitter. I liked to look at other people’s tweets and read the news but as far as contributing to the conversation I didn’t really feel like I had anything worth saying.  During my time exploring the platform and practicing the techniques that Newhouse Social Media Professor J. Grygiel my influence has grown substantially. But what’s even more exciting is I feel like I have created a space for myself.

I have raised my Klout score 10 (from 44 to 54) points in the last 90 days and gained 29 new followers! I thought I was doing pretty well in the social space but I am really happy with the direction my influence is going . I think that finding a voice and a tone has been the most beneficial to my influence. I now have this kind of fun, quirky, sarcastic tone that helps to make my tweets more engaging. I have noticed that people seem to like things on Twitter that are emotional in some way. They either make you think or they make you laugh.

The platform is two-fold: entertaining and informative. But there are some universals for both Twitter worlds, for example anything with rich media performs better. My top tweets show that video, photos and even emojis help content to perform well. However, not all of my tweets with photos or videos made my top ten tweets. I noticed that the content had to have appropriately entertaining or informative copy as well as the media. It wasn’t enough to just post a photo of a cat with copy that says “cat”.

Hashtags are extremely important.  I saw much better engagement and higher impressions on tweets that had more than one hashtag. The real winners, though were the tweets that featured hashtags that are relevant in culture and had an in real time feeling (like live tweeting at an event).

While I am proud of growing my influence and my followers, I wonder if having a concentrated group of people in the Newhouse Social Media class is really what helped me grow. We all want to help each other and many times we were live tweeting during class and were constantly liking and retweeting each other. My best tweets in terms of engagement were posted during class. I am curious to see how my influence and follower base changes after the class ends.