#CSTop10

Posted on by Cameron Spera

Welcome to the #CSTop10 (like #SCTop10, only with my name instead of SportsCenter…ok I tried.)

In looking back to find my top 10 tweets, there was so much fun, interesting, and compelling content surrounding the tweets that brought back a lot of cool memories from all of our different Twitter assignments and the engagements that I made. I’ve had Twitter since early on in high school, but I definitely learned to use Twitter in new, more engaging ways and I think that evolution really shows through if I were to compare my Twitter use now to my Twitter use a couple months ago. But instead of doing that and seeing how lame I used to be at Twitter, let’s see how much progress has been made since the beginning of the semester and look at some of my best tweets from #NHsmc. So without further ado, here is the #CSTop10!

  1. Ron Burgundy

This was my top tweet from the whole semester! I tweeted this before News Engagement Day, which was a big event going on around the world to promote reading the news and staying engaged and Newhouse was hosting a number of events that day. When I was first thinking of something to tweet to promote #NHned, I wasn’t sure which route to take, but I decided not to just make a normal tweet promoting the hashtag and chose to have a little more fun with it. I love Ron Burgundy and I was hoping that my fellow journalism students and news followers would enjoy this tweet as much as I did. In the end, it paid off pretty well because the tweet received 508 impressions. This tweet got 53 total engagements, including 4 retweets and 5 likes. One thing that I think made this tweet stand out was definitely the media attached to it. I think tweets with pictures and media are likely to attract the eye more so than a tweet without it. It also received a retweet from the Newhouse News Department, as well as one from a Newhouse professor, which I thought was pretty awesome. Newhouse was definitely monitoring #NHned pretty closely on social media, but it was really cool that they went out and chose to engage with the people using their hashtag and see what the buzz was around it. One thing that we talked about a lot in class was joining in on popular or trending hashtags to get engagements and I think this assignment showed that hashtags can really work to your advantage when trying to create interactions.

2. Blog Promotion

I tweeted this to promote my personal blog site and received more engagement than I thought and I would- and not just on Twitter. I received 508 impressions and 12 total engagements. 6 people clicked on my link, which is really cool because that means that people actually wanted to read my stuff! One of those 6 though was my dad, who texted me after he read one of my posts telling me how proud he was of my writing (he’s a lawyer and cares a lot about grammar and syntax- maybe a little too much). One thing that was really helpful for this tweet was using our Hootsuite skills to shorten links. This was a really great skill to learn and definitely came in handy throughout the semester because it can be hard to include links within the 140 character limit. Even though this tweet doesn’t have media, I think the link definitely made people more interested and maybe a little click happy, just to see what it was all about.

3. Half Time at Syracuse Football

This tweet wasn’t for any assignment in particular, but I decided to use the class hashtag just to try and increase engagement. I received 466 impressions on this tweet and 77 total engagements, which is the most engagements I received on an #NHsmc tweet all semester. I also got 5 likes and 1 retweet, some from girls on the dance team. I even got some engagement from my mom (she took the video- as you can see, my parents are pretty active on Twitter). I also got 2 replies to this tweet and 116 media views! I think the video definitely attracted people to this tweet and made people stop on their timeline to see what it was. Also, interestingly enough, when I post my dance team videos on Facebook, they are always my most liked posts and sometimes I’ll get over 100 likes on a single video. I think this says a lot about how media like pictures and video attract people to your content and become distinguishable from other normal tweets. I really like that Twitter let’s you post videos now because it creates a more all-encompassing social medium that has the ability to share all different types of content. I don’t usually tweet a lot of videos, but I know that I always am more likely to stop or click on a tweet with a video in it when I am scrolling through my timeline.

4. Be Kind

I tweeted this when we were assigned to tweet using a daily hashtag and when I heard about #WednesdayWisdom, I really liked it. I think that the picture in the tweet is definitely what made people engage and click on the tweet, which received 454 impressions and 31 total engagements. Using daily hashtags and an inspirational one in this case is a really cool way to use a trend and flip it into a positive message, both things that we talked about in class as ways to increase engagement. Positive messages spread more than negative ones and it is always a good idea to join in on trending hashtags. I think that this is a message that all people can relate to and understand, so I thought it was a good trend to join in on and hopefully change someone’s day for the better.

5. Male vs. Female Athletes

I made this infographic using Piktochart, which was really user friendly, except I’m just not very good at that whole X and Y axis thing and kept filling in the wrong sections with the wrong information- which is when I switched to a pie chart because I thought it would be much easier to handle. Piktochart and other sites or apps that allow you to make infographics are an awesome way to show information that deserves more attention than just a tweet listing off numbers. It also creates a visual that is more likely to catch peoples eyes and increase engagement. This tweet had 353 impressions and 34 total engagements, mostly from people clicking on the picture to see the full infographic. Not only does the infographic increase engagement, but I think this information is pretty striking and made people stop for a minute. The numbers, which I got from the Tucker Center for Research at University of Minnesota, are so lopsided in terms of female coverage and sport and I thought it was a really imporant message to share. It received two likes and 18 media engagements.

6. Social Media

When I tweeted about @MariSmith, who is a professional in the social media field and has over 415,000 followers, I received a lot of engagement. This tweet made 308 total impressions and got 9 engagements. 5 people clicked to my profile from the tweet, which I can only imagine has to do with the 4 followers I received immediately after this tweet. Using words like social media or #socialmedia in a tweet can really create a lot of interaction on your profile. I got follows from some social media professionals who I have never interacted with ever before. I thought it was interesting that they would follow me and not just retweet or like my tweet if they liked what it said, but they upped my follower count so I guess it worked out for me in the end. There are probably a lot of people who monitor tweets with those key words in them and follow up on tweets like mine that are promoting a certain person within social media.

7. #TeslaTuesday

There’s a lot going on in this tweet, but a lot of cool stuff at that. First of all, I tweeted this when we were assigned to use a trending emoji and I was scrolling through the photos on my camera roll to try and find some inspiration. I got up to this picture and decided to do a throwback tweet, with a trending emoji, a photo, and #TeslaTuesday. It made 260 impressions and got 70 total engagements. First of all, it had a photo, which I think drew attention to the tweet. Second, it was a picture of a Tesla. How cool is that? This was probably one of most awesome moments of my life and I just had to share it on Twitter and I got some great engagement from it, including 4 likes. Using a trending emoji and hashtag was a great way to increase Twitter interactions.

8. @EthanZ

My next tweet came from the @EthanZ assignment, when we were asked to tweet at him to try to get him to engage with us since we were reading his book for class. He’s a very influential person in the social media world and we got to him through mass tweet at him, which was really cool because then he ended up following Professor Grygiel and coming to Syracuse to speak. I think these tweets really struck him since we all did it on the same day. He probably felt inclined to check out what was going on with all these random college students tweeting at him with #NHsmc. In the end, it worked out for our class and I think really proves the power of social media and engaging effectively on it. This tweet received 237 impressions and 14 total engagements. I think it would be really incredible to total up all of the engagements from all of the class tweets @EthanZ to see how many impressions we made and show how you can use social media to create relationships with people you have never even met before.

9. @kimincuse

For this next tweet, I mentioned a professor that I had last year for one of my BDJ classes. Her name is Kim Brown and she is one of the most phenomenal human beings I have ever met. Not only does she have extremely helpful LinkedIn and Twitter tips, but she is so willing to help students find their place at Syracuse and beyond. I needed some help looking for an internship last summer and after taking her class, I knew she was the right person to talk to since she now works in Career Services. I wanted to engage with her because her love for social media is awesome and really fits well with a lot of the topics we’ve been talking about in class. I think she would be an extremely great resource for anyone in our class, if not to talk about career opportunities, but to just have a conversation with in general. I decided to show her some Twitter love, which garnered 235 impressions and 15 total engagements, as well as an #NHsmc hashtag click. She also replied to my tweet.

Tweeting at and engaging with influential people on Twitter can really up your game.

10. I’ve Had the Time of My Life…and I Owe It All to COM427

I created this last tweet when we were practicing making GIFs and embedding them into tweets. I tried creating one with footage off of YouTube and really got a kick out of it and it just so happened that the Nationals (my favorite baseball team) had been doing really well in baseball at the time. I received 232 impressions and 10 total engagements, as well as 51 media views. Once again, I think adding the media, in this case the GIF, really attracted people’s attention. It’s really cool to see GIFs on Twitter because they automatically start when you’re scrolling through your timeline, which I think is a nice feature.

In all, I think the #CSTop10 really captures a lot of lessons that I learned throughout #NHsmc. Some of the biggest takeaways were definitely using different types of media to grab viewers, engaging with influential people to make useful interactions, and using trending hashtags to increase engagements from viewers who aren’t necessarily your followers.

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