#MWTop10: My Top 10 Tweets From The Semester

Posted on by Marcus White

In real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.” On social media, it’s “engagement, engagement, engagement.” After a semester of tweeting using the class hashtag, “#NHSmc,” it’s clear that the best way to solicit engagement is through the use of some form of additional media. Whether it’s using links, hashtags, photos, or polls,  including media is a simple, compelling way to create follower engagement. Plus, my tweets this semester reiterated the lesson that positive content has the best chance at succeeding.

With these insights in mind, let’s take a look at a compilation ten tweets from this past semester, which I’m calling the #MWTop10 (get it trending, folks). These tweets are presented in ascending order of total engagement, with other illuminating statistics also presented.

10. Hotline Bling jumps the shark

Total Engagements: 16 

Poll Votes: 13

This tweet served as advanced promotion for my group during our class’ Periscope activity. My group attempted to parody Drake’s Hotline Bling video,  which had gone viral about week or so before that class. I “played” Drake in the parody, and thought a fun way to promote it would be including a poll asking my followers if they thought I could pull it off. As expected, they didn’t. But, it served as a fun way to promote our impending Periscope. In hindsight, I wished I’d included a link to Professor Grygiel’s handle, as that was where the stream was taking place, and I could have directed more traffic to our actual stream.

9. News hounds and news pups

Total Engagements: 17

Link Clicks: 6

Media Engagements: 3

On October 6, we were tasked with promoting the S.I. Newhouse School’s efforts on National News Engagement Day, an initiative designed to encourage people to get informed with the news. We had to use our class hashtag, as well as Newhouse’s own hashtag (#NHned), so I had a limited character count. Plus, we became even more limited as we had to also include an image. I decided to include the image of the poster of the ‘pup’ reading the newspaper, and play off of it. I wanted to say that your level of news engagement doesn’t really matter, as News Engagement Day is for ‘pups’ and ‘hounds.’ It worked, as I was retweeted by Newhouse’s Newspaper and Online Journalism department, as well as a professor in that department.

8. #50Forward

Total Engagements: 17

Link clicks: 3

Tasked with tweeting about Newhouse’s 50th anniversary and as an aspiring sports broadcaster, I decided to tweet about the daunting task of living up to the school’s incredible sports broadcasting legacy.  I tweeted at ESPN’s Mike Tirico, an SU alum, with the hopes of getting engagement from him. Although he didn’t reply, retweet, or like my tweet (yet), I was able to solicit more engagement by including a link to Newhouse’s compilation of tweets from the event. 

7. Monday Night Football and Star Wars converge

Total Engagements: 17

Media Engagements: 12

As a massive sports fan and Star Wars diehard, I thought the convergence of the two brands for the release of The Force Awakens’ highly-anticipated final trailer was incredibly interesting, as both are now owned by Disney and have been cultural landmarks sine the 1970s. For this tweet, we had to incorporate a Google ‘ngram,’ which examines the literary mentions of any terms you choose, over a time period that you set. So, given the release of the new Star Wars trailer, I thought it would be interesting to examine how much they’ve been mentioned over time. The contrast in the graph was particularly stark, and including media made it even more intriguing.

6. A 30 Rock follow

Total Engagements: 24

Media Engagements: 1

Replies: 1

To my surprised delight on October 14, I woke up and found that the actor Keith Powell had followed me on Twitter. I’m still not really sure why he followed me, but as a big fan of 30 Rock where he played the character ‘Toofer,’ I wasn’t going to ask too many questions. I decided to reach out to Powell to see if I could get a response, and included a YouTube link of my favorite of his on the show. To my even greater surprise, he replied with his own favorite moment from the show. I basically felt like Kenneth in the elevator with Jerry Seinfeld.

5. Corkboards: the ‘O.G.’ social media

Total Engagements: 24

Detail Expands: 12

Media Views: 1

For this tweet, we had to find a real world example of social media, and include a picture of it. Since I spend so much time at Citrus TV outside of class, I decided to include an example I saw there, and tag the account in an attempt to drive up engagement. I’m certain that including the hashtag ‘#socialmedia’ helped, as we were required to do, since it is one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter. This tweet also took place earlier in the semester before I understood what including a “title safe” image meant, and I think I could have increased my media views by taking the picture in a way that it could have been seen in full on my followers’ Twitter timeline.

4. Rainy days have me feeling like George Michael Bluth

Total Engagements: 26

Media Views: 61

Follows: 1

In addition to loving sports, Star Wars, and 30 Rock, I’m also a big fan of Arrested Development. All semester, I had wanted to include one of the most ‘viral’ moments from the show: George Michael Bluth’s sad walk, set to the theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas. On one of the many dreary, rainy days in Syracuse, I saw my opportunity. and tweeted a GIF of his sad walk. I got a decent amount of likes and retweets pretty quickly, but was also able to solicit the most media views of any one of my tweets this semester, likely because of the viral nature of the image and the inclusion of the hashtag ‘#Syracuse’ to expand my reach.

3. You’ve got a friend in me

Total Engagements: 31

Link Clicks: 6

One day, we were assigned to tweet something positive about ourselves (which I’ll get to later), and one of our classmates. I decided to tweet about my colleague, friend, and the person who sits next to me every day in class, Taryn Varrichio. She had just reported on her first Syracuse men’s basketball game, and I saw an opportunity to promote her own post about it on Instagram, as well as a chance to promote the Citrus TV Sports department’s own Twitter account. We’d learned this semester that positive tweets often solicit the highest engagement, and that was proven here, with one of my most popular posts in terms of links clicked.

2. Mike Francesa and the Sports Guy collide

Total Engagements: 41

Detail Expands: 27

Link clicks: 6

We had to include a Soundcloud link in this tweet, and I decided to include an interview that Mike Francesa conducted with Bill Simmons from three weeks prior. The interview had taken the sports world by storm, as Simmons was not previously allowed to speak with Francesa when he was employed at ESPN. I included the hashtag ‘#MongoNation’ in an effort to expand engagement to Francesa’s notoriously loyal fanbase, who spend a lot of their time on social media.

1. Doing what I love most

Total Engagements: 51

Media Engagements: 32

Likes: 7

As I mentioned earlier, we had also been assigned to tweet something positive about ourselves, so I decided to tweet about my upcoming games playing for my club roller hockey team. Over the semester, I had found I had gotten decent engagement on tweets I sent at around 10 A.M, so I scheduled the tweet in Hootsuite for that time. Although I didn’t receive any retweets, the seven likes were the most I’d gotten on a tweet using the class hashtag, and the total engagements were also the most. This tweet reiterated my major Twitter takeaways from the class: in order to maximize engagement, tweet positively and include media.

Leave a Reply