Making My Twitter Game Stronger

Posted on by Jane Hong

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

So, I’ll admit it: I’m addicted. Twitter’s white bird greets me in the morning as I open its application and catch myself up on all of the news I missed during the night. My right thumb will subconsciously move up and down, as if it’s permanently scrolling through news feeds. I think in hashtags, and speak in sentences that are 140 characters or less.

#NHsmc is partly to blame.

Coming into this course, I had experience with social media in professional and personal capacities. My 7-year-old Twitter account had 735 followers at the beginning of the semester, and a Klout score of 60–which combined my Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts. Over a four month period, I gained 58 followers and my score increased to 65. The engagements I received on my Tweets undoubtedly contributed to my growing social media presence.

Here are just a few examples from the semester:

Ah, my introduction to #NHsmc using a picture of my personal Bitmoji. It’s no secret that visual content dominates news feeds, and are more likely to receive engagement from followers. This particular Tweet received 114 engagements, and made about 900 impressions. When assessing the people who favorited this Tweet, I found most of them were my Newhouse and/or Syracuse University peers who may have already been familiar with the class and its hashtag.

Posted just a day after the song and music video for Beyoncé’s “Formation” was released, this Tweet surprisingly only received 14 engagements–but made 858 impressions. It would have gained more engagement had I included the #Formation hashtag.

Generally, my followers are acquaintances or friends who are familiar with who I am and what I’m passionate about. It’s no surprise that posts referencing myself or my work gain hundreds of impressions–as this one did. It garnered just over 900 impressions with 250 engagements.

When you see a cute dog like this on your newsfeed, how could you scroll past without giving it some love? Clementine was able to make 754 impressions and 61 total engagements. Again, a collage like this gains a lot of attention on news feeds because of the “real estate” it takes up on one’s newsfeed.

My Twitter list of publications centered on hip-hop was created during “The Life of Pablo” hype. Unfortunately, while it made 690 impressions, it only had 39 total engagements. No one ended up subscribing to the list either, despite 13 people clicking through to see it. This could be attributed to the fact that lists aren’t as popular of a feature of Twitter, or that I didn’t use any trending hashtags.

I did, however, use the trending hashtag for #GRAMMYs related content. This only gained 12 total engagements, and made 629 impressions. Because the actual event and hashtag occurred weeks earlier, this was considered old news.

There were several journalists who posted Bernie Sanders’ controversial quote. I specifically replied to Kenneth Vogel because he was one of the few verified accounts I could find, and I saw that he had high engagement on most of his Tweets. Sure enough, my reply alone made 1,735 impressions, and gained 47 engagements.

A picture of gorgeous Puerto Rico and an emoji contributed to the overall success of this Tweet. It received 78 total engagements–including the 23 likes–and made 559 impressions. Had I mentioned Puerto Rico’s tourist agency account, it may have gotten a retweet and more attention from those outside of my personal network.

When you combine an embarrassing throwback photo and a fun fact, you get a Tweet that can make over 1,000 impressions. This one specifically made 1,118 impressions and had 159 total engagements. The 32 favorites and one retweet are mostly from friends–but this is the most amount of favorites I received on a post throughout the semester.

Making this title safe helped with centering the photo, and making sure that people could see the focal point of the picture. The post received 900 likes, and 51 total engagements. Again, adding visual content is what really contributed to the success of this particular post.

And there you have it: 10 Tweets that bear the burden of showing the Twitter-sphere everything that I learned in #NHsmc. While the course is coming to a close, I’m confident that my eagerness to learn more about social media and how our communication methods evolve over time will only grow.

In the mean time, find me on Twitter: either scrolling through my feed, or writing my own posts to contribute to yours.

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