Let’s See How Far We’ve Come

Posted on by Arick Wade

Part I: My Influence:

Twitter Followers: I started the semester by determining that I will keep my Twitter that I have been using since 2009 as my Twitter profile for the class. So I began at 728 followers and over the course of the last three months, I had a 6% increase in my Twitter followers, resulting in 776 followers.  How did I do this? By making new friends throughout COM 427, I gained a majority of my followers this way and by frequently engaging with their tweets, i.e. favoriting or replying to a classmates tweet. Yet, I also tweeted @ certain brands such as Draft Kings, a daily fantasy sports gambling site and I gained five- ten followers in relation to the content I was tweeting about throughout the semester.

Klout: Being a social media enthusiast, I had heard of Klout back in the Fall of 2013 and started checking Klout more frequently thoughout the years and even became experts in topics and acquired perks such as a Mcdonald’s gift card and Pillsbury baked goods all for simply tweeting about their product. It is because of this frequency of my tweets where I used to tweet 10-15 times a day that my Klout score was 57 at the start of this semester. However, it is now 50. Do I have a reason for why it dropped? It is possibly my Instagram account after it crashed yesterday wiped away my Instagram influence on Klout causing it to drop (Due to time restraints, I reactivated it last night, but it takes up to 48 hours for it to reactivate, making it possible my new Klout score won’t show up until late Wednesday). Or it is possible that my new Twitter persona of only tweeting up to 5 times a day maximum that caused my decrease in influence on Klout.

Part II: Throughout the Semester

This is a recycled video from last year when Syracuse made the tournament and I did a funny video on Facebook of me ringing an orange cowbell. I figured this would be a good time to use the #BleedOrange as Syracuse entered ACC Tournament Play in early March. This resonated with a lot of my audience coming from the Syracuse University area as it gained 752 impressions, 148 media views, and 9 favorites. I notice as I went through my top ten tweets  that having a media source such as video or a photo are more likely to have more impression and engagement than just a plain text tweet.

Once again, another one of my top tweets involved a Syracuse theme as well as another form of media, a photo. It gained 661 impressions and a total of 101 engagements with 14 likes. I actually used this photo earlier in the year on Instagram during the Freshman Involvement Fair to promote OttoTHON. I used the same photo with a filter that could have caused this to have more engagement than it would have with no filter.

Another media tweet of mine, this time a group of pictures gained 512 impressions, 68 media engagements, and 5 favorites. I think once again that the reason for such high impressions and engagement with this tweet results from the media I am using. By using a series of photos, I created a story of a trip to D.C. and by having in the caption “I have a feeling I’m not in Syracuse anymore…” it resonates with the majority of my Twitter audience that for once I am not in Syracuse tweeting about Syracuse University related things.

I listed these two tweets in my top ten not because of the favorites, but the fact that these tweets got 600 and 500+ impressions despite only having 3 and 2 favorites on them. The reason they got that many impressions is because both people I tagged in the tweets, Nick (Contestant on The Bachelorette) and Stephanie (Houston Texans Beat Writer) engaged with my tweets. By being interactive and personal with them, they felt a connection via social media and felt the need to engage with my tweets either by liking the tweet or replying.

This tweet earned 136 media views and 464 impressions along with 5 favorites. I have noticed a trend of using media such as videos, pictures, groups of pictures, etc. to gain more interaction on my tweets. This being just a quick Twitter video of playing a card game in the student center at Syracuse resonated with once again my audience of Syracuse.

This was an A/B test tweet that I used during class and I was just expecting it to maybe get a favorite or two. It ended up with 546 impressions and 72 media engagements and 9 likes. Part of my reasoning for why this tweet was so successful was actually the filter. Professor Grygiel said that most popular filter on Instagram is Valencia, so I screenshotted this after posting to Instagram and cropped it and posted it to Twitter. I would like to think that the filter is the reasoning behind the strong engagement with this tweet.

This tweet by default was one of my most popular tweets because it was my promoted tweet for my viral project. Organically, I had 291 impressions and then with the promotion, I had an extra 539 impressions equaling 830 impressions. This use of Twitter Ads and Twitter Cards is an interesting way to get more engagement on a tweet of yours and is a great tactic to get more likes and interaction on a tweet that a person wants to go to a large group of people, hence the viral project.

I wanted to utilize my Twitter poll tweet on my portfolio because it is an excellent way to get engagement on a tweet without really knowing who is even taking part in your poll. While I only have 23 votes, I have used similar polls on Twitter and have had up to 100+ votes on polls. I had 370 impressions with this tweet and think that if I promoted it more throughout the day, it would gain more. I wish I retweeted it and quote-tweeted it to keep it presence in my newsfeed or even use a Twitter Card to get more impressions and therefore more votes on the poll.

For my final tweet, I thought it was fitting that I end with yet another Syracuse-related tweet. I had 580 impressions on this tweet and 11 link clicks sending them to a video of my roommates and I talking about Syracuse basketball in their run to the Final Four last year. I think that a common trend in my tweets is to get a lot of engagement is interact with the Syracuse community more. I believe since I began tweeting a lot more as I went to college, I had gained a little following of sorts from Syracuse students and they enjoy seeing content related to their lives. So as I grow up and continue to go to different places and interact with many different people in many different places such as moving to Minnesota this summer, I could possibly attract a Minnesota audience with my tweets and overall social media presence as time goes on.

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