Oh, How Things Have Changed

Posted on by Matthew Reil

I’ve been an avid social media user for the last five to six years, but never in that time has my presence and influence on those platforms changed more than it has in the last three months. Since January, my Twitter followers has grown from 308 to 365.  That is nearly a 20% increase in followers (18.5% to be exact). A substantial number given the time frame. I even had a tweet generate over 4,000 impressions organically, something that I could never have done before this class. My Klout score increased from 39 to 49, which is a 25% increase. That reflects the improvement in influence on not just Twitter but my other social platforms as well.

I did a lot of things differently that helped me garner this improvement. One action that allowed me increase my influence and followers was the use of hashtags. This was noticeable in a couple instances. The first is with my tweet that reached 4,000 impressions. I had a large number of users retweet and like the tweet that didn’t even follow me. This shows that people were able to find it other ways, through a hashtag search. The tweet had the hashtag “#marchmadness” in it. At the time the popular tournament was going on and i’m sure a lot of people were scanning the hashtag. By using it, my tweet could be find by those people. Hashtags also helped me with my viral content challenge. I reached over 500 views on imgur within 24 hours. One thing that helped me was my hashtag use. I used a lot of generic hashtags that had a lot of global use among other users. The more popular the hashtag, the more people who would search it, which drives more traffic to my picture. Some examples of the hashtags were “#food, #foodporn, #babies, #college”. All of them were very popular. On top of hashtags, I put out a lot more content on a consistent basis, which helped increase my influence and allowed me to reach more people. Those two things combined (hashtag use and more consistent content creation) were key to my followers gain.

Despite this, I wasn’t perfect in increasing my network and some practices didn’t work. I am a big sports guy and my sports tweets don’t always resonate with a every one of my followers. I try to be professional in my tweets but because I am a student and don’t have as much credibility in my opinions as some bigger name professionals in the sports media world. I also tried to be humorous in some of my tweets. Clearly, I am not as funny as I think I am. Humor is a tactic that I will look to continue to try to implore though. Finally, a lack of creativity in some of my tweeting may have hurt me. A lot of my sports messages were generic and not distinctive point in themselves, if that makes sense. Creativity breeds network growth.

Overall, I did a lot of good things and picked up some new tricks to the trade. Here are some of my best tweets of the semester:

This was my main viral content challenge tweet. I used a twitter card and a caption that I thought would resonate with college kids. It didn’t resonate as much as I would have liked but it did it’s job and supplied my imgur post with over 80 more views. The tweet lacked creativity and I would have defintely tried to come up with a better line if I had a redo. In my opinion it would have garnered more interactivity with the card, which of course was the main goal. Still, it had over 600 organic impression and a decent amount of retweets and likes so it clearly was not the worst.

The periscope challenge was one of my favorite classes ever and this was one of the weirdest thing I ever watched, albeit very funny. Posting it at 3:00 PM hurt it’s influence and reach, but it still got 300 impressions and three likes. Other people seemed to like it.

My march madness tweet may not have accumulated many likes or retweets but it did have 39 engagements and over 200 impressions. I thought it would have more. It was a tweet that should have resonated with A LOT of my sports followers, especially since it was during the height of March Madness. It could have been the fact that the words scrolling at the top didn’t explicitly show the name of the song but it was easily identifiable by the art. I was confused by the lack of a reaction to this.

Virgina sports have had a terrible year against Syracuse sports. Defalting comeback loss after deflating comeback lose. After Syracuse lacrosse handed the Cavaliers another one of those loses, I chose to create a twitter moment of tweets that surround the event and the other Virginia loses beforehand. Obviously was not a hit, no likes or retweets, but I am proud of the card. It was unique and creative. A lot of my friends and followers would understand it and enjoy it. I posted it at night too, at 9:00 PM. It is supposed to be peak time for my followers to be scrolling their timelines, but tweet the only got just over 150 impressions and one reply. However, I love the tweet and thought it was a great moment.

23 people viewed this periscope video from twitter and 38 viewers watched it live. Not a bad showing despite only having an impression count in the 100’s. I think we could have increased those numbers with a more creative broadcast topic, but the SU men’s basketball season had just ended and as you can tell by now, I am a sports guy. Most of my tweets surround the topic.

Exhibit number 3,500 of me tweeting about sports. This is the only tweet I put in that lacked the class hashtag, but for good reasons. It accumulated OVER 4,000 impressions organically. The most viral tweet I’ve ever had. It also gained a ton of likes and retweets from people that did not follow me. The use of the hashtag was key.

This poll asked a major question that the sports world is still trying determine. The MVP race is a tight one so I thought it was good poll to pose to my sports followers. 15 people voted so not a horrible showing and two likes to go along with over 300 impressions. I expected more votes but beggars can’t be choosers. I had a lot of feedback that I should have incorporated Lebron James as an option. Maybe if I had I would have received more votes.

Magic Johnson is one of the most prominent sports figures of all-time, having graced TIME magazines cover once. This was huge news. He would take over as the president of the Lakers right before the trade deadline, very questionable timing. This only received one engagement. I don’t know why. My only thought is that most of my followers are from the East Coast and aren’t Lakers fans and don’t care.

The one tweet of mine that got displayed in class. I did a good job promoting the deep link of my snapchat and even got a few new snapchat friends.

My personal favorite tweet. Only three likes but it is always fun to laugh at yourself. In one day I got a $600 speeding ticket and diagnosed with the flu and my friend texts me “You are having a terrible day”. Never a bad thing to be humourous and I thought this was pretty funny.  It got over 80 engagement, which was a surprisingly large amount.

At the end of it all, I feel like I really grew as a social media user. Never underestimate the power of a hashtag.

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