Influencer / Top 10 Assignment

Posted on by Joshua Schoch

Part 1: Influence

My Twitter follower numbers did not grow very much during the three-month period from January 20 to April 20 during the course. I did notice that I had more than 50 new followers add me during this time. However, I also lost a lot of followers from my previous audience as well.

Before this course, I used Twitter mostly as a self-promotion tool when I worked as a writer. I wrote about sports as a paid content writer for three years, and as such, my audience expected me to tweet about sports. However, a change in content to social media clearly made a few dozen members of my audience stop following me. As such, my Twitter follower count only grew from 339 to 352.

While some tweets about sports and interesting media seemed to work because they got the most engagement, the tweets only containing writing about new media clearly did not.

However, my Klout score did rise considerably during this time. I started at 34 and grew that number to 47. The biggest bump came on February 10, when my Klout jumped from 42 to 46. However, it did not change much after that point.

Part 2: Execution

Unsurprisingly, my tweet with the most impressions and engagements from the semester was my promoted Twitter card for the Viral Content Challenge.

This tweet garnered 1,152 impressions (374 organic, 778 promoted) and 66 engagements (40 organic, 26 promoted). While the promotion led to more impressions, the engagements came more from my personal promotion of the web card to friends and family.

However, the tweet with the most organic impressions was one directed at Sports Illustrated, taking advantage of the media outlet’s huge following.

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However, this tweet only had one engagement because there was no media to engage with.

One common theme in my tweets was that those with media in them (such as pictures, videos, periscopes, etc.) were consistently making more impressions and having more engagements.

These five tweets were my most influential tweets involving media, combining for 1,614 impressions and 108 engagements, all of which were organic.

This tweet resonated with my east coast following during a cold front, and acknowledging that it did motivated them to engage with the tweet. However, it also likely discouraged west coast followers from clicking on the media.

This tweet had multiple engagements from the Newhouse community, as well as broadcast professionals in the field. This is likely because Newhouse’s new studio is one of the main attractions at the school.

This picture definitely resonated with followers because it was interesting to see a boat hanging halfway out of a minivan. It’s an odd sight, which gives it some value online.

I was surprised to see that this tweet had such a high rate of engagements because the subject of the graph is not exactly the most thrilling topic. However, having rich media in the tweet certainly corrected for that.

This tweet clearly struck home with recent SU grads and current seniors, many of whom have signed the walls at Chuck’s.

However, not all tweets needed media to get noticed. One of my most popular tweets came during our voice assignment when I imitated Donald Trump.

This tweet came as the GOP primaries were picking up and Trump continued to make headlines. I was able to use that to my advantage, utilizing two of his most popular hashtags and writing something that appealed to both his supporters and his opposition. That’s why this tweet made 631 impressions and had 25 engagements.

Another way I found to increase activity on my tweets was to mention common themes in pop culture. This tweet about J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar’s rumored collaboration had 271 impressions and nine engagements.

This is likely because I tweeted it right around the time that their collaboration was supposed to come out, and the headline was that it did not.

Lastly, it turns out that tweeting to influential organizations like Education Week will certainly improve number of impressions, but not necessarily engagements.

This tweet had 416 impressions, but only seven engagements for an engagement rate of less than two percent. This is because I mention the organization, but the content isn’t necessarily appealing to a widespread audience.

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