How I Grew My Personal Influence On Twitter

Posted on by Larissa Urbiks

I started my Twitter handle in March 2015 as a requirement for a public relations class. I wasn’t interested in Twitter at all, and so it came that I barely used it. I would rather spend my time on Instagram or Facebook. That changed by taking the class “Social Media for Communicators” where I finally had to deal with Twitter, and so I could recognize the benefits of it:

  • Hashtags make it easy to find information, news, opinions, and trends to specific interests such as virtual reality.
  • Hashtags and tagging make it easier to engage with other users, especially when you’re not connected to them.
  • It’s the main platform for news and trends because it’s easy to share them and to reach a large audience.

I’ve learned various methods to engage with the community and to grow my follower base as well as my personal influence. At the beginning of the class, we were asked to tweet four times a week to experiment with all those methods. But even later without this requirement, I posted regularly. I started on 28 August with 29 followers. After being tweeting for three months, my follower base increased by 50 (172,4 %) to 79.

As shown in the screenshot above, my Klout score increased from 15.18 to 48.58 with a peak of 52.14. Klout measures how influential my social media activities are. The highest increase (almost 10 percent) happened after I published my first Twitter moment.

What worked?

The secret behind Twitter is using hashtags. If you chose the right ones, it’s possible to reach a broad audience. It always worked better for me when I focused on particular interests such as trends in media because using hashtags like #VR or #360videos guaranteed that I reach the relevant audience for this topic. I once gained over 1.250 organic impressions just by using those hashtags.

Another method that worked well was using rich media. My tweets with photos, videos or GIFs usually performed better than those without media. I think this is because they are more appealing and when people scroll through their timeline or search for particular hashtags they will rather see those appealing posts.

Retweets from influential people are probably the best social media technique, but unfortunately, it can’t be planned. I tagged organizations or persons for several times in my tweets, but most of the times they didn’t react. In general, the chance for a retweet or like is higher if you don’t tag celebrities like Miley Cyrus but experts or influencers in particular areas.

What didn’t work?

During this semester, I tweeted about a lot of different topics: human rights, trends in media, travel, college life and some random stuff. When I published a post related to travel and earned a new follower, I would probably lose him tweeting about media the next time. I’m quite sure, that I could gain more followers by just covering one topic.

I could also improve my engagement. I would describe my Social Media Personality on Twitter as partly “Lurker.” I tweet regularly, but besides, I don’t engage much. I rarely like and comment other tweets.

10 Best Performing Tweets

In the future, I will work on those issues and concentrate on the techniques that worked best. Here are ten of them:

No. 10

On my road trip to Watkins Glen State Park, I recorded and posted my first Twitter video. This tweet with 355 impressions and 16 total engagements is a good proof of the effect of rich media. A video makes it possible to express a lot in just one tweet. But for this post, I used another technique as well. Since I wanted to tell more about my trip, I used a tweet thread to do that. A tweet thread is a simple technique where you reply to your own post. By doing this, a story develops, and I could show a video from Watkins Glen in connection with the road trip video before.

No. 9

I created this tweet for the viral content challenge where I tried to promote my Imgur meme. Even though without the promoted actions, the post could enter the top 10 with 307 organic impressions and 11 total engagements. The main reason for that is the GIF in combination with relevant hashtags. The GIF is funny and eye-catching, and the hashtags guaranteed that it reaches the appropriate audience.

No. 8

A couple of my posts dealt with human rights, but they were more general and mentioned organizations which stand up for this topic. In the tweet above I talked about a particular case and could reach 292 impressions and 19 total engagements. I think focusing on an individual fate was the main reason for the better performance of this tweet. Furthermore, the case is much-debated especially in Germany, but also other countries are talking about it. Using the key hashtag #FreeDeniz helped me to jump into the discussion and reach those persons who care about the case.

No. 7

That is the first post in the Top 10 that resulted out of our Periscope challenge. I used a quote tweet to share my team member’s poll. Doing this allowed me to add a comment to her tweet. Even the only hashtag I used was our class hashtag, and there was no rich media either, I reached 367 impressions. Since the whole class was live tweeting during the challenge, there was a lot of traffic on the hashtag. That’s why this single hashtag was sufficed, I guess. This case shows that it’s not necessary to use as many hashtags as possible but that the right and relevant ones are enough. The reason for the little engagement is probably the missing poll in the quote tweet. That the poll isn’t displayed is a problem because my copy doesn’t make sense without this context.

No. 6

Another Twitter video and another proof of the effect of rich media. I filmed this scene in the beginning of the Thanksgiving break when most students were already home. With the hashtags #Syracuse and #NHsmc I guaranteed that the tweet will reach relevant people, but I expanded the audience with the hashtags #snow and #thanksgiving. Those hashtags had a lot of traffic then. All in all, my tweet reached 400 impressions and 23 total engagements.

No. 5

When I received my business cards, I wanted to share them with my Twitter community. This link between the offline and the online world resulted in 494 impressions and 26 total engagements. I tried to engage with Moo.com, the company where I ordered my business cards and tagged them. This method worked out well – Moo liked my tweet.

No. 4

The second tweet from the Periscope challenge. Much of the other tweets analysis applies to this as well. What I want to mention here is that this tweet was with 474 impressions and 29 total engagement more successful than the other one. I think I can trace this to the rich media on the one hand and to its uniqueness on the other hand. I captured a funny situation, and my copy was in exactly the right voice to get my classmates to engage with it.

No. 3

Another Twitter video with 785 impressions and 18 total engagements. This time I made use of the feature to add more scenes to one video. Through the hashtags #Syracuse and #SU, I could reach a relevant audience. Furthermore, a Syracuse University fan page retweeted my tweet, and since they have almost 500 followers, it reached additional people. They wouldn’t have found the tweet without the hashtags. That is another evidence for the importance of hashtags.

No. 2

This post was one of our very first class assignments. We should find in real life social media, and I found this newspaper snippet on my landlord’s fridge. The 806 impressions and 44 total engagements are especially notable when you remember that I had only around 30 followers at that time. My professor Jennifer Grygiel did a great job engaging with this tweet. She liked, commented and shared it. Since she has around 1.500 followers, it could perform as good as it did.

No. 1

My most successful tweet doesn’t look successful at all just seeing the number of likes and retweets. But this tweet proofs that it doesn’t need many retweets if the right person shares it. I used Social Rank to determine my most influential Twitter connection, which was MrScottEddy – a luxury travel influencer. Before I reached out to him, I analyzed via Social Rank what his most used hashtags and words are. Those were: travel, wine, and #LuxuryTravel. The platform also showed me the emoji he likes most. I created a tweet that included all of those finds and tagged him. The point before his handle ensured that it’s a public tweet and no direct message. He shared my post with his 1 Million follower base. His retweet was retweeted 29 times and I could gain new followers.

All in all, I found a lot of working techniques, and I grew as strategic social media user.

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