A Story of Personal Growth Through Social Media

Posted on by Leah Newton

I’ve always considered myself a fairly quiet and private person. Before #NHsmc, my social media reflected that sentiment. My posts were minimal. I only followed and was followed by friends and family. And I was always hesitant to try new ways to engage on social media. Now, I take a look back at the most active 3 months of social media I’ve ever had to analyze my personal growth and influence.

INFLUENCE:

I started this semester with 57 Twitter followers and finished with 73: an overall growth rate of 28%. Klout is a measure of how much influence a user has on Twitter. My Klout score slightly increased from 15 to 25 from mid-September to now.

I wanted to make a note about Instagram as well. I have a personal, private Instagram with 492 followers. In order to maintain the overall theme of that Instagram account, and for privacy reasons, I was not willing to use that handle for class posts. I created a second account from scratch (0 followers, 0 following). That handle now has 37 followers and only follows 15 people. My guess is the active use of hashtags and tagging allowed this account to quickly gain followers and establish a good follower-to-following ratio (because we all know it’s all about the ratio).

EXECUTION: COUNTDOWN OF TOP 10 POSTS FROM #NHsmc

10) Using the repost app, I found a visually engaging photo from my hometown ski resort. I gained quite a few followers after posting this most likely due to the high profile of the original account. It got 11 likes total which was the most on this new Instagram account up until that date.

9) For the next post, the assignment was to capitalize on a trending hashtag. I chose #WalkToSchoolDay. I’d had success using GIFs in previous posts, so I decided using one for this post could potentially bring more engagement. This post received 2 likes and 176 total impressions.

8) This post was my first attempt using Boomerang. I’d had success in past posts using animals, so I chose to include a cat in the visuals. This post received 27 views (from 37 followers) and 16 likes total.

7) By the time of this next post, I’d curated a theme of posting about animals. I took a screenshot of my dog’s Instagram post that blew up and got over 3,000 likes and used the TFW format to present the media. This was the assignment where we replied to our tweet to create a thread. My reply to this post has the #NHsmc tag in it (since clearly this original post does not). This post had 3 likes and 1 comment in 183 total impressions and a 16% engagement rate, according to Twitter Analytics.

6) This next post was by far my most successful Instagram post. I used the Over App to apply text and graphic overlay to my own compelling image. The “adventure awaits” phrase is common among nature and exploration-type content. I used the “period, return” technique to hide lots of hashtags. After posting this, I received likes from many accounts that didn’t even follow me, presumably because of the hashtags. This post received 19 likes and 1 comment.

5) Using the Google Street View App, I created a 360 image. I chose to go into the middle of the woods at Green Lakes State Park to create the feeling of being completely surrounded by nature. This post received 3 likes, 12 engagements, and 212 total impressions.

4) After analyzing my followers, I found out one of the girls I worked with when I was an intern at NBC Sports was my most influential follower. She and I stay in touch so I knew I could make this post light-hearted and fun even though I was still reaching out to a “weak tie”. She’s the social media director for the Arizona Coyotes NHL team. I’d had success with GIFs on past posts, so I searched specifically for a Coyotes GIF to acknowledge her job. She ended up quote tweeting me and commenting on how much she liked my post. She also messaged me on Facebook to tell me she thought it was funny. My tweet received 6 likes, 54 total engagements, and 424 impressions overall.

3) This next post was my first attempt at making my own GIF. I knew I wanted to stick to the dog theme I’d started to curate on my profile, and then I remembered the funny scene from Marley and Me where Marley tries to escape from the car while they’re still driving. I just looked up a video of it on YouTube and used imgflip.com to create the GIF. I used the TFW trend to write the text. This tweet received 8 likes and 1 comment. It got 45 engagements and 509 impressions overall.

2) One of my most successful posts was the one used in the Viral Content Challenge. Sticking to my animal theme, I created a funny, relatable cat meme. Although there was money behind this post, it still received 559 organic impressions. It got 928 promoted impressions, for 1,487 total impressions.

1) I chose this final post as my most successful based on Twitter Analytics. For this post, we were meant to create our own unique hashtag. After looking back, my hashtag (#youdidntseeitcoming) had been used many years ago. But, the GIF was so engaging that it was still a successful post. Again, I used an dog GIF because I’d starting sticking to an animal theme and had previous success with GIFs. I also used the TFW trend to create the accompanying text. This post had 4 likes, 1 retweet, and 1 comment. It had 19 total engagements and 939 impressions overall.

Overall, I’ve been able to try a variety of techniques to expand my social media knowledge and figure out what seems to work best for me. I’m still hesitant to post constantly for privacy reasons, but I definitely feel like I have a better feel for how to maximize social media when I do choose to post.

 

 

 

Leave a Reply