Engaging the World: A #NHsmc Experience

Posted on by Sara Gatcomb

From beginning to end, senior year certainly saw some social media improvements. In January, my previously private Twitter account had only 26 followers. By opening my account to the public and actually engaging with the social world, I was able to raise that number to 143 as of the end of April. In that same time frame, my Klout score more than doubled, starting at 15.48 and ending with 40.72. I can’t say that my SYSMOS authority score is all that impressive (3/10) but it’s like “they” always say: there’s always room for more improvement.

The trick to social media success, I’ve learned, is knowing your audience and connecting with them. In the Twittersphere, the audience is quick, fast-scrolling, and generally short on attention. In my experience, the best way to connect with that audience is to create rich media content.

I collected my most successful tweets of the #NHsmc class by looking at a curated channel of my personal #NHsmc tweets on Tweetdeck and scrolling through my own Twitter feed. I based “success” in terms of which tweets had the most engagements (i.e. retweets, tweets, replies).

Some of my most successful tweets included pictures:

This #TravelTuesday tweet included a beautiful picture of St. Paul’s Cathedral that I took on my trip to London. The picture was apparently interesting to at least six people, as it was retweeted once and favorited five times. I even got a reply on this tweet from someone asking for places they should visit on their upcoming trip to London.

When it comes to free speech, no one does it quite like Newhouse. I snapped this picture, added a quick filter and tweeted it. Again, six people engaged with the tweet but this time everyone favorited it, including the Newhouse School Twitter account.

The unique hashtag I created as part of a #NHsmc assignment ended up becoming the official hashtag for Mornings On The Hill. It was even printed on our t-shirts! This photo was a behind-the-scenes shot of one of our producers walking through the newscast. I think part of the success of this particular tweet is because the photo itself is engaging with the video wall in the background. It also helped that the tags encouraged our team to engage with the content.

The concept of tagging social media influencers has had a starring role in my social media successes:

Again, a Mornings On The Hill tweet that recieved six engagements likely because of tagging not only the show handle but also the BDJ Department handle. 5:1 ratio on favorites to retweets.

After our class with Talia Minsberg, I made sure to tweet at her with a couple of hashtags that related to what she had talked about in class but also to her career. Within minutes, I had eight favorites on this tweet and when I looked through the profiles of those doing the liking, it became clear that they were social media enthusiasts. Everyone was either following Talia or explicitly interested in social media. So, again tagging the influencer and using the hashtag was a big part of my success with this tweet.

Much like photos, I experienced a lot of success on social media by using gifs:

This gif was actually the first gif I ever made. I experimented with a filter and just kept the content simple: my friend prepping her bagel in the newsroom. The tweet garnered one retweet, four likes, and 508 impressions. Again, the handles and hashtags helped me out.

While not all of my gifs or posts are about Mornings On The Hill, a lot of my most successful ones are. I can’t help but think this has to do with the real world connections I have with the people I am tagging. They know me. I know them. They follow me and they see the content. Of course it also helps that the people in the photos are young professionals who are always looking to showcase their work. This is a gif of the control room for the Mornings On The Hill newscast just a couple of weeks before our debut. This one steps above my usual six engagements and hits seven with two retweets, five favorites and over 1,000 impressions.

The last gif I made was of the Adobe Premiere timeline when I was editing my senior Capstone. This tweet was lower in engagement, most likely because only a specific audience would understand what the visuals are and what the “Capstone” context is. The one retweet and three favorites came from people who have followed my Capstone journey and know the relief that finishing that project will produce. However, the 444 impressions were likely not all people I knew.

Finally, attempting to go viral and actually paying for promotion proved to be a very useful strategy for getting audience engagement.

This is the tweet that I actually promoted with my Twitter campaign. I kept the copy simple, understanding that people would be more interested in what the content was. I paid $5.00 for the campaign and received seven retweets, eight favorites, 2, 721 Twitter impressions and more than a thousand views on Imgur. Overall, using Twitter ads really seemed to increase my engagement and presence on Twitter. During this campaign, I gained followers and have continued to since.

This was a less successful tweet with the same content from the Viral Content Challenge. It was actually the first tweet I put out with the content and did it as part of an experiment. This tweet received no portion of the $5.00 Twitter ads campaign. Instead, I used only word-of-mouth marketing to promote this tweet. That resulted in four retweets, three likes and just over 500 Twitter impressions.

Ultimately, staying relevant and productive on social media is work but when you like it, as I have for this class, it reflects in the success of your posts.

 

 

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