From Beginning to End – My Semester Social Media Journey

Posted on by Chase Guttman

From the beginning to the end of this course, I saw both my professional Twitter community and my casual Twitter’s followings increase. My initial benchmark for my photography page on Twitter was 3,582 followers. That grew at a pretty sluggish 0.2% rate to 3,589 followers. As for my casual Twitter page, which I used to complete the majority of my class assignments, I went from 1 to 16 followers, an insane percentage growth of 1500%. I think having these two Twitter accounts to compare with one another is proving to be incredibly useful. As a result, I can see the tactics that I learned in class and employed on my casual account had a huge impact on my following and my engagement in contrast to the account where I didn’t use those same strategies. Even though my professional account should’ve had more momentum than my casual one, it grew less both in terms of raw follower numbers and definitely in terms of pure percentage growth.

As for my Klout score, I started at 61, peaking at a score of 62 during the middle of the semester (just missing the mark where it could be rounded up to 63), before returning to its current state of 61. I think this is a reflection of how difficult it’s for a Klout score to climb on the higher ends. However, the fact that I was able to climb in the middle of the semester while completing class social media assignments, is a further illustration of the actual power these content strategies have.

Overall, I think rich media tweets worked well in terms of engagement.

134 impressions, 2 engagements
This tweet was effective because it was timely and it participated in a trending topic — #NationalTacoDay. It also had rich media, a gif, that was very humorous. Perhaps, more food hashtags could’ve brought in a larger audience and waiting a bit longer, until lunchtime, when people are thinking about tacos. This is an example of me doing a class assignment (to be a part of a trending hashtag) while using a class tactic (including rich media) to help garner additional attention.

 

In particular, my collage tweet did the best as it really allowed me to capitalize on my personal photography skills.

216 impressions, 24 engagements
This tweet was effective because it allowed me to introduce my drone photography to the followers of my casual page. It was very rich in media, as per the assignment, with three photographs in one post and I think the majority of the engagement came from people exploring those images. I also brought in people from different communities with #drone and #photography. Next time, I should talk a bit more about the images so the hashtags seem less spammy.

In terms of building a following, tweets where I engaged influencers brought in the majority of new people to my account — particularly when that specific influencer engaged with my tweet.

974 impressions, 10 engagements
As mentioned, this tweet attracted a lot of eyeballs because it involved an influencer, as was recommended in the class, who then engaged with the piece of content. This was a win we talked about in class because him liking the tweet meant people who follow @ramit would occasionally see my tweet in their timeline. As always, I should’ve included some sort of relevant image to make the tweet stand out in people’s feeds more.

What didn’t work for me as much is linking to articles. That is likely because I haven’t built a Twitter community around specific interests on my casual account, so articles spanning a few different industries aren’t going to attract much attention.

134 impressions, 3 engagements
In the early days of my professional Twitter page, writing tweets with interesting articles and links is all I did. I soon realized that if I curated gorgeous imagery instead, be it mine or someone else’s, I would get more engagement because the content was richer in media and more eye-catching overall. Link-based tweets can work, but you need to build a community around the topics you’re talking about. Otherwise, people won’t bother engaging with your “boring” articles. Here’s me trying to make a link Tweet assignment work and not doing too well engagement wise.

703 impressions, 9 engagements
Another example of engaging with an influencer — this time my verified professor. Statistically, this link-based tweet performed better than the previous one because it mentions an influencer who then interacts with the tweet itself. However, the tweet could’ve been made better with an image embedded. This was for an assignment where we had to talk about social media and the hashtags helped bring in people interested in the topic.

246 impressions, 4 engagements
This was one of my first tweets in the class but I think it worked mostly because of the engaging image and its moment value. Perhaps tagging my friend in the post next time could’ve led to greater impressions.

107 impressions, 1 engagement
This tweet was done for a Twitter list assignment. It was fun putting together the list, but I attracted low engagement because I didn’t yet realize the power of tagging these influencers and getting them to interact with the post. The screenshot itself also wasn’t too awe-inspiring.

1923 impressions, 34 engagements
This was the tweet I used for my Twitter ad — hence, the highest impression and engagement numbers. In this post, I tried to write meme text content for a meme image. I think it was funny enough (one of my favorite tactics!) to garner those numbers, however, I think there was some confusion about what people are actually clicking through to since the meme itself is already embedded.

Muddied boots are left out to dry in the imposing shadows of a towering peak.

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This is an example of what I often do on Instagram as was also reinforced by the class — use the maximum number of relevant hashtags possible to get the most impressions and ultimately engagement on an Instagram post. In this particular instance, I hid my hashtags in the first comment of the post.

This is another example of what I often do on Instagram as was also reinforced by the class — using geotags to place the image in the world and to get additional attention from people possibly browsing that geotag. In the future, I may want to use a more generalized geotag to get even more eyeballs on the post.

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