My Twitter influence: What worked and what didn’t

Posted on by Anne Palmer

Over the course of the semester, I didn’t see as much growth in my Twitter influence as I would’ve hoped, but I still saw some. I grew in followers and in my Klout score, and also just generally tweeted more. It’s hard to tell why some tweets did better than others, but it appears that it has something to do with whether I used hashtags, handles and images or whether the tweet was just words. I noticed that a lot of my quote tweets don’t tend to do as well as ones that include original content.

It also has to do with relevancy and who you’re communicating with, I think. One of my best tweets using #NHsmc was the morning after primary day, where I linked to one of my story’s on the Daily Orange about Syracuse University students having trouble voting in the elections. I included @SyracuseU in the tweet, which I think helped push it out into more people’s feeds. But while more people than average saw the tweet, very few people interacted with it. In the future, it might be helpful for me to include an image or a pull quote to demonstrate why the link is worth clicking.

On the point of relevancy, I think it’s important to tweet often about things you’re an expert at. For me, according to my Klout profile, my “Expert Topics” include Syracuse, Journalism and Newspapers. I try to target my tweets to those audiences, which I think helped improve my Klout score and my Sysomos authority score. My Klout score went from 15 to 40 in the past few months, which was cool to see. That being said, I was kind of surprised to see my Twitter follower authority be so high. I don’t think I engage with people on Twitter who have a particularly high authority, but in looking at Sysomos’ website to see what an average follower authority usually is (it’s something like 2.7), 4.7 seems somewhat above average. My own authority was still pretty weak, though.

View post on imgur.com

In terms of individual tweets, here are 10 that had the best engagement and impressions:

Engagements: 6

I tweeted out one of my Daily Orange stories following primary day using the hashtag #NYPrimary, which was one of the more active hashtags in the election season conversation – at least in New York. I also included @SyracuseU’s handle to expand my reach in engagement.

Engagements: 3

I can’t remember how I came across the original tweet – I think it must have been retweeted by someone I follow – but the user @SeanMcElwee has close to 15k followers, so I would imagine that maybe his followers were reading the tweet replies and saw mine, which would account for the higher number of engagements.

Engagements: 62

I think this got so many engagements because it had a prominent, colorful image, included a pretty general/popular hashtag and was targeted at a major social media influencer. Also it was liked/retweeted a good number of times.

Engagements: 10

Again, here I used a quote tweet to highlight something relevant happening that weekend. I feel like the quote tweet may have worked against me – I’m not sure – but it still got 4 likes which is pretty good.

Engagements: 38

I think what made this tweet was the use of the photo grid and use of handles. Also emojis, because everyone loves emojis.

Engagements: 8

The engagements on this tweet were low, but the impressions were high and I got quite a few likes. I think this might be because #DamnDaniel is so frequently checked/at the time the meme was still popular.

Engagements: 7

This tweet probably did well because @jmgrygiel so kindly retweeted it. Also because I mentioned @reddit.

Engagements: 9

Again, this tweet did well I think as a result of @jmgrygiel retweeting it. I didn’t use any hashtags or other kinds of outreach, so I’m surprised it got as much engagement as it did.

Engagements: 34

Logan retweeted this, plus I made sure to use @dailyorange and #FinalFour in the tweet so that it would be included in the ongoing conversation about the games.

Engagements: 23

I included @DennysDiner in the tweet because even if it doesn’t get read by the company itself, it would show up in the feed and get some engagement that way.

Leave a Reply