My Twitter Semester

Posted on by Emma Matteson

At the beginning of the semester and before my social media crash course, I had only 103 followers on Twitter. I went on maybe once a week and never tweeted anything. I wouldn’t follow me either. At the end of the semester I’ve grown my follower count to 134 ( a 30.1% increase) and grown my klout score from 35 to 41 (a 17.14% increase).

I think it’s easy to figure out the increase in followers. I never posted anything before. The extent of my Twitter activity was tweeting memes at my friends which is not very entertaining. During class, I became much more active on the platform and managed to find my voice. I think my tweets reflect who I am in real life so my friends are much more likely to engage with me. I also think some of the best practices I’ve tried to include, such as well placed hash tags and mentions, have made my presence more known across the web and I got some follows of people I don’t know. I think that my new mix of media on twitter, from images to polls, will make my account much more interesting and fun to follow. So I think that that was what I learned the most- creating an account that is easy for people to engage with as well as easy to find. Really personal things and really basic things that don’t have much personality didn’t work, so I learned to try and make the weekly assignments fit my new voice so they wouldn’t seem strange or out of place to someone on my feed.

Here are my top 10 most influential tweets and what made them so successful.

This didn’t have an overwhelming amount of visible love, like likes or re-tweets, but it did have 70 engagements. I believe this was due to the image which is relevant to the majorty of my followers as Syracuse University students, as well as the fact that mobile, where most of my followers access Twitter, only shows a snippet of an image.

This tweet came as a part of the Viral Content Challenge. I think it was successful (with 63 engagements) because of the nature of the meme I created, as in, people gravitated towards the Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen graphic. I also tried to hashtag two popular terms I thought people would be searching with #trump and #meme.

For this tweet, I included a group selfie at one of my favorite spots to visit in New England during the Summer. It was more successful than I would have imagined with 56 engagements, dispite having 8 favorites which is slightly above average for me.

I think people like the occasional cute animal photo on their Twitter feed, so I think that taking this photo which I originally captured on Snapchat would at least gather some clicks. It ended up with a retweet, a favorite, and 36 engagements.

This was one of my personal favorites. This was taken from the class discussion on emoticons versus emojis. I think the voice of the tweet was goofy enough to get the multiple favorites and ultimately had 30 engagements on a tweet with no image which I consider to be successful.

This was a follow up to the previous tweet. I think people like engaging with polls because they can do so anonymously. I also liked the way I worded the tweet by using overly dramatic words like “offensive.” Neither are terribly offensive, to be honest. This ultimately had 22 engagements.

This tweet came from the voice assignment. I was trying to sound like one of my favorite comedians but couldn’t think of a joke, which seemed like a joke itself. I just wanted the content to be simple and funny. This ended up with 20 engagements.

I wanted to find a way to get people to care about the environment, or at least realize the situation we’re in, which can be hard to do because it doesn’t seem to directly threaten us. Everyone loves avocados, so showing people that something they love and take for granted could disappear if we don’t change. I think it’s a sly way of poking fun at how we can all be a little selfish about the environment. This tweet had a lot of favorites and retweets for me, and ended up with 17 engagements.

This was one of my first tweets for class. I wanted to suggest two influencer accounts I follow and love as well as a personal friend. I think the mix of the two was fairly successful for engagements, as this tweet had 16.

This was one of my most recent tweets. I thought it was successful because it references something a lot of people are doing which is go abroad. I also wanted to make it a little more interesting that just a plug for my abroad trip, which I did by adding my (poor) Spanish. This tweet had a lot of favorites and 16 engagements.

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