Me, An Influencer? Mama, I think I’ve Made It

Posted on by Monica Kimberley Savanne

Part 1: Influence

Overall, I am reasonably by the growth of my social influence over the past 91 day period particularly given that  I’ve never been very into social media, particularly Twitter. Despite having a twitter handle for the past four years, I never really used the platform until freshman year and even then wasn’t very active. However, I can definitely say I have developed a better grasp of Twitter and how to use it to create influence over the past three months. My Twitter following grew by 5.64% from 248 followers on 8/29/2018 to 262 followers on 11/28/2018. However, I feel that the reason why my follower growth wasn’t as substantial because my tone and voice changed with some of the assignments and so there was a lack of consistency with the rest of my feed

Over the past three months, I incorporated several different strategies aimed at increasing my Twitter following as well as engagement. The first, and perhaps most obvious strategy was tweeting more often than usual. I went from posting about a tweet a week to at least one per day. Additionally, I began trying to use more hashtags than was my norm. I have always shied away from using hashtags but utilizing ones that were relevant to the content of my tweets proved to increase engagement by allowing me to be visible to audiences that weren’t just my followers. Furthermore, I did my best to incorporate rich media, particularly gifs, images and memes, to my tweets. This strategy was based on class discussions about the fact that people are more likely to engage with media rich tweets. This proved to be successful as this type of content was amongst my top tweets.

Part 2: Execution (Top 10 Tweets)

1. Shameless Fan Love

Impressions – 302
Total Engagements – 4
Details expands – 3
For this tweet, I practiced engaging with a someone on Twitter who has a great profile and chose to try and engage singer/songwriter Sampha. Sampha is a fairly popular artist as evidenced by his 83.1k followers, and his page may be managed by someone else as is the case for several artists. I feel like that’s why I wasn’t successful in getting a response from him. Looking back on this tweet based on what I’ve learned in the course in regards to engaging someone with a good Twitter profile, I would have engaged a micro influencer. Although I feel that the engagement for this tweet was good. However, as this course was executed earlier on in the course, I didn’t yet see the value in using more hashtags and rich media. I think that if I had implemented those strategies, I would have gotten some more engagement.

 

2. Different Voice

Impressions – 351
Total Engagements – 24
Details expands – 6
Profile clicks – 4
Hashtag clicks – 2
For this tweet, I practiced emulating the voice of someone I admire on Twitter. I chose to emulate R&B singer/songwriter SZA. Majority of her tweets are about spreading positivity and good energy which is what I tried to replicate as well as using an emoji which she often does. I feel that her messaging resonates with and uplifts people. Therefore, by emulating her voice, I was able to attain some of my highest engagement with 11 likes and 1 retweet.

 

3. Moments

Opens – 23
Unique opens – 20
Completion rate – 65%
For this tweet, I created a Twitter moment. As someone who loves music, I chose to base my moment around my top unforgettable experiences which have all been at concerts. I feel that this moment resonates with my Twitter audience, hence the fairly good engagement of 6 people liking my tweet, as majority of the people I follow and who follow me are music fans or in the creative field. Additionally, the cover image is a quality picture of myself, my friend Chloe and rapper Smino which I feel also drove engagement. Looking back however, I think that using hashtags that related to music would have pushed this tweets engagement.

 

4. Who Doesn’t Love A Good Collage?

Impressions – 299
Total Engagements – 30
Media Engagements – 19
Detail expands – 5
Hashtag clicks – 1
The strategy I used for this tweet was creating a collage. I chose to center my collage around winter, using images I took from last semester. This is also the point at which I began incorporating more hashtags, as discussed in class, that weren’t the mandatory course related ones. My engagement of four likes and one comment was okay. I feel that my use of rich media was definitely instrumental in driving engagement. However, majority of my audience demographic is located in Kenya and other parts of Africa. Therefore, a winter related tweet doesn’t resonate which perhaps influenced the average engagement.

 

5. #FollowFriday

Impressions – 122
Media views – 24
Total engagements – 8
Detail expands – 3
Profile clicks – 1
The strategy I used for this tweet was creating a Twitter list and scheduling out the post via Tweetdeck as well as using the popular hashtag #FlashbackFriday. I also incorporated rich media by using the famous Turn Up the Volume meme popularized by YouTube star Jay Versace to compliment my list of my three current, favourite UK R&B singer/songwriters. The engagement for this tweet was average as I only got four likes. However, one of these likes was from Tiana Major9‘s manager which was quite exciting. Looking back, I think that perhaps incorporating more hashtags could have helped in driving more engagement.

 

6. Cross Promotion

Impressions – 747
Total engagements – 15
Media engagements – 7
Detail expands – 4
Profile clicks – 1
The strategy I used for this tweet was cross-promoting my East African music blog’s Instagram handle on my personal account. I utilized rich media in the form of screenshots from Tangaza’s Instagram page to as well as the shrugging emoji which is one of the more popular ones. I also weaved some relevant hashtags into the tweet’s copy The whole idea behind this tweet was introducing my blog to my Twitter audience and driving more traffic to its Twitter page. In terms of engagement, the tweet got just one like but two retweets which was more than I had gotten on previous tweets. After learning about promoted posts, I feel that this would have been a great tweet to create a marketing campaign around

 

7. What’s Trending?

Impressions – 278
Total engagements – 9
Link clicks – 8
Detail expands – 1

 

For this Tweet, I tracked a trending topic using Tweetdeck and created a tweet around it. At the time, the TV show This Is Us was amongst my top trending topics and so I chose to tweet about it making sure to use the shows hashtag. I also incorporated a deep link, something we had recently discussed in class, from Variety’s piece discussing some pivotal moments in setting the stage for season 3 of the show. Analyzing the engagement for this tweet was interesting for me because despite not getting any likes, retweets or comments, was amongst my top Tweets for October according to Twitter Analytics and got 8 link clicks proving the importance of deep links in driving engagement.

8. Bringing Back the Good Stuff

Impressions – 212
Media views – 55
Total engagements – 9
Detail expands – 2
Media engagements – 1

 

This tweet was based on replicating the engagement I got for my top tweet at that time by using similar strategies. The main feature of my top tweet  had been a twirling GIF of Rihanna. I utilized a similar form of rich media again, choosing to go with another GIF of Rihanna. Unlike my top tweet, I made sure to use a hashtag that was relevant to the copy of the tweet. I tweeted this post out during midterm week and so #midtermweek was very timely. This tweet unfortunately didn’t get as much engagement as the top tweet it was modeled after as it gained 6 likes and no retweets as compared to the other tweets 7 likes and one retweet.

9. Broke and Bougie

Impressions – 4,434 (total), 106 (organic) and 4,327 (promoted)
Total engagements – 276
Link clicks -227 (total), 7 (organic) and 220 (promoted)
Detail expands – 25 (promoted)
Profile clicks – 11 (promoted)
Hashtag clicks – 4 (promoted)

 

The strategy behind this tweet was creating a Twitter Ads campaign that utilized a Twitter Webcard for my original Imgur meme. This was my first experience creating a promoted post and was therefore a great learning experience. The Tweet was promoted over the period of a week and my total budget was $5. This tweet incorporates a deep link to my Imgur meme as well as several hashtags that targeted my target audiences, all of which was part of my marketing strategy. The engagement for this tweet was 1 organic like and 9 promoted likes. One mistake I made when posting this tweet promoted tweet was selecting promotion-only within the Twitter Ads interface which made finding it on my profile difficult which I feel may have hindered engagement

10. #BlackLivesMatter

Impressions – 251
Total engagements – 9
Profile clicks – 2
Detail expands – 1
I was spurred to post this Tweet due to our in-class discussion about using social media as a tool of social justice. I was particularly compelled to tweet about #BlackLivesMatter because, as mentioned in class, the prevalence of this Tweet has declined despite the fact that racially charged police brutality continues to prevail. I chose to include a deep link to the heartbreaking story of Jemel Roberson’s murder in order to educate my Twitter audience on the issue. I also chose to add the class hashtag as a reply rather than having it as part of the tweets copy as I wanted the Tweet to really be more than just an in class assignment. This tweet only got two likes but three retweets which I was happy with as this meant that more people were being exposed to this story.

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