Throughout the semester, I have been tweeting for a class I’m taking in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The class has taught me a lot about social media and though I entered the class with a relatively established Twitter account, I have grown my twitter account a lot since the beginning of the semester. I began the semester with 398 Twitter followers and I’m wrapping up the semester with 462 followers to my account. I joined Twitter back in high school and I can’t remember a time where my account experienced more growth. Though I’ve definitely gained Twitter followers through my work for the Daily Orange, the independent Syracuse student newspaper, the social media class has encouraged me to tweet more often and taught me strategies to tap into niche markets and audiences I never had before.
While I received followers from my fellow students in the class, the largest chunk of followers I received was by integrating hashtags into my tweets to allow people who didn’t follow me to see my tweet and hopefully the users would like my content enough to follow my account. One example of a tweet that allowed the number of Twitter followers I had to grow is below:
My favorite #TravelTuesday pic of outside my home last summer on #CapeCod. A great summer with great people #NHsmc pic.twitter.com/J8cpWW05qR
— Liam Sullivan (@Liam_Sullivan_) November 3, 2015
By using the hashtags #TravelTuesday and #CapeCod I tapped into audiences that didn’t necessarily follow me. This tweet in particular helped my Twitter account gain three followers – all travel enthusiasts.
One thing that I think held me back from growing my followers as much as I could have was tweeting non-sports related things for class. As an aspiring sports journalist, the vast majority of my tweets are sports related. In order to continue my path to becoming a successful sports journalist, a reliable source of information and a trusted opinion, I try to tailor most of, if not all, of my content to sports. Occasionally tweeting non-sports related information held me back from gathering a trusted base of followers for sports and I know that I lost followers who came to my account for field hockey information – my beat at the student newspaper for the semester.
My Klout score saw a great deal of growth over the past 90 days, almost the entirety of the semester. My lowest Klout score rested at 35.61 at the beginning of the 90-day period and 90 days later on December 6th, that score has now grown to 43.34 and had been as high as 44.09 on November 29th. I know that the tools and strategies I learned from this class helped me grow my influence and account and will continue to help me grow my account moving forward. Using hashtags and media (images, videos, etc.) were strategies I didn’t use often before I enrolled in the Newhouse Social Media class, but they are invaluable tools that have and will allow @Liam_Sullivan_ to continue to experience unprecedented growth.