Growing a Twitter Influence

Posted on by ztamuzza

To start this semester, I really never used Twitter. I began with just 7 followers, having never attempted to engage with anyone on the social media site. From late August to now, I have gained a total of 23 new followers. This percentage of growth since the start of the semester was a whopping 329%, which makes sense because I started with 7 followers. To increase my influence and network, there were some posts that worked and some that didn’t. The trends I found most effective in the posts that worked were relatable, funny, and original. The things that weren’t effective were trying to promote either myself or other brands on Twitter because it felt like an ad, and no one wants to click through advertisements. What I could have done to improve my performance was targeting audiences with hashtags, adding context to stories, and working on more interesting wording. Enough talk about Twitter, let’s dive right into the actual tweets that helped grow my influence.

I’m going to be analyzing my top 10 tweets in order of how successful they were, including the impressions, engagement, and engagement rate of each. Let’s begin with my most successful tweet, a tweet where I refuted McDonalds.

This tweet earned 487 impressions, 23 total engagements, and a 4.7% engagement rate. The higher impressions could be linked to the retweet to help increase views. To relate to my audience and make them laugh, I challenged the notion McDonald’s made about nothing being better than drive through fast food. I related to those who have experienced a drive through ATM machine, and made people laugh at the fact that money is indeed better. This tweet utilized the relatable feeling of drive throughs and transformed a reference to a familiar brand into something people could laugh at. Even though this tweet was a comment to another tweet, being connected to the brand McDonald’s and relevance of #NationalDriveThruDay helped to raise interest. My second best tweet also proved relevant.

This tweet earned 469 impressions, 11 engagements, and a 2.3% engagement rate. This tweet didn’t have the same goal to make the audience laugh, but it was relevant to the recent release of the Joker movie trailer. One of the likes on this tweet was by a verified Joker movie account. I engaged with those interested in the movie by using the hashtag #Joker, which could be attributed to the 80 “media views” that followed. Adding my own opinion to see if the new Joker character will thrive in the role in comparison to the last movie showed another opinion on the role. My favorite villain of all time is also the most mentioned pop-culture villain ever according to Google Trends. Adding this huge presence to a timely post helped this tweet to be more effective than the rest. The next best performing tweet is my very first tweet.

Regardless of the quality of the photo, this tweet actually performed decently well. This tweet earned 322 impressions, 78 engagements, and a huge engagement rate of 24.2%. This tweet’s main goal was to breakdown why college students put up posters. These posters reflect a sense of who they are and hold social currency to make them fit in with the crowd. This IRL social media is a collection of popular contemporary Kanye West albums. This picture led to 64 engagements to expand to image, probably because people could relate to the poster and wanted to feel a sense of positive emotions associated with knowing all the albums after understanding the reference. Trying to expand my influence from the start, there was no one more influential than Kanye to trigger conversation with the huge audience he attracts. The next tweet was an original creation by yours truly.

This tweet earned 293 impressions, 61 engagements, and a 20.8% engagement rate. With this post, I created an original collage of my favorite animals with some humor added in there. The main goal post was to trigger emotions and make my audience laugh. When placing two cute animals such as my dog and a flying squirrel together, it spurred lovable emotions within my audience. This positive “aww” reaction was most likely responsible for the 4 likes. I crossed these lovable emotions with humorous emotions as well. The “buffalo chicken” was a fake animal that was a play on words, and the same cute squirrel was caught doing a comedic pose while flying. The buffalo chicken was a meme found online, and even though this post was not relatable or relevant to audiences, it succeeded through the joy associated with seeing this original collage. After this tweet, engagements drop off quite a bit. Instead of pointing out everything I did right, I will try to add suggestions to what I can do to improve it. My next tweet was actually a reply to try and get a famous person to engage with me on Twitter.

This tweet was successful in its 247 impressions, however, it did not receive any engagements because it was directed towards Neil Patel. The main goal of this tweet was to get a famous twitter account to engage with me. Neil is a Forbes Top 10 marketer of 2019 and I asked him about creating better content. Ironically, my content did not receive any engagement. The lack of engagement was due to it being a reply. The impressions were successful because I used hashtags to target those looking for tweets linked to marketing and innovation. Without the targeted hashtags, this tweet would have been one of my worst due to its lack of appeal to people other than Neil Patel or those interested in his work. My next tweet is my own opinion about paying college athletes.

This tweet earned 246 impressions, 8 engagements, and a 3.3% engagement rate. This tweet’s main goal was to voice my opinion and attract other twitter users with the same opinions. This tweet came at a relevant time when a bill was passed to compensate college athletes. After lots of controversy, I chased the side of the story that majority of college students were on. When people care about an issue, they share their opinions on the issue. I could have used more hashtags to attract those types of people, but regardless, this tweet got views due to it’s timely upload. Another way I could have improved this tweet was to add more of a narrative surrounding the bill being passed. Not everyone knew about the bill, and a narrative would have gave background to make more sense of my opinion. In my next post, I tried to engage with a Newhouse Alumni.

This tweet earned 219 impressions, 7 engagements, and another 3.2% engagement rate. Back to back, I have received a low engagement rate. Much like the Neil Patel tweet, this tweet was directed to one person. This tweet performed better in engagement because I made it relatable to those who looked forward to getting their Sports Illustrated magazine. I gave background with mentioning his article, and incorporated #NewhouseNetwork to engage further with the Newhouse community. The mention of receiving old Sports Illustrated magazines was nostalgic, but my audience consists mainly of Gen Z who never experienced that. I could have targeted those audiences with #SportsIllustrated or #SI. Another way I could’ve ensured Anish to engage with me is by making my tweet an addition to his article. He knows that people enjoy Sports Illustrated. I could have incorporated something different I learned about the sports world in a Newhouse class he may have taken to make it more personable, thus triggering more emotion. In my next tweet, I talked about an advertising stunt Volkswagen did.

This tweet earned 206 impressions, 1 engagement, and a 0.5% engagement rate. I tweeted a #ICYMI about how Volkswagen changed the position of its car on the famous Abbey Road album. This advertising stunt was huge because it came on the 50th anniversary of the album. When I tweeted this article, I assumed it would perform better than it did. It was relevant to the day, it was a brilliant idea, and it was a fun story to read about. Even the hashtags targeted everything involved with the tweet. Sadly, the wording I used in my tweet made it seem like just another advertisement people would be looking at. Unless the advertisement really spoke to audiences, they would most likely not want to click into an advertisement that an advertising student like myself found interesting. Next time, I simply need to do a better job of wording why this story is interesting and use words that will make people want to read more into the story. In my next tweet, I tried to relate to those like myself who were seeing Hulu advertisements everywhere.

This tweet earned 196 impressions, 8 engagements, and a 4.1% engagement rate. I tried to steer the conversation towards the massive amounts of publicity Hulu was receiving with its most recent advertisement stunt. These ads had famous athletes visibly taking large amounts of money just to say “Hulu has live sports.” These videos poke fun at professional athletes doing commercial spots for the money. This tweets main goal was to make my audience laugh at the irony in case people didn’t know. Sadly, if the right audience wasn’t targeted, then they really didn’t know. Hashtags could help solve this issue, but the biggest thing I could have done was linking the caption to a video, instead of the picture. The whole humor of the ad is in the video, and without the video the message could have gotten confusing for some audiences. In my final tweet, I made my own Twitter moment.

This tweet earned 172 impressions, 15 engagements, and a 8.7% engagement rate. After Daniel Jones had a stellar breakout NFL performance, I opted to make my Twitter moment about him taking over as quarterback in New York City. This moment actually got some good engagement, as 11 of them were link clicks. Again, the lack of hashtags limited my audience. The one hashtag I did add was the #NHsmc in a linked tweet, making the original look more unprofessional. The original content that was relevant to what just happened the day before and people were more inclined to click my link. This news was applicable to sports fans of the Giants, and I even added humor in the moments. These references were relatable and humorous to people like me, but the tough part about Twitter is realizing everyone is unique. Everyone looks at the world through their own perspective, and we need to utilize our own perspective on topics to give it attention.

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