Personal Influence Growth

Posted on by Madison Van Den Eynde

Part 1

I decided to take this class because I wanted to learn how to become engaging on social media and learn the best practices to do so. Therefore, I decided to use my professional twitter I made my sophomore year, to grow and use for this class. Before this class, I had used the twitter account very sparingly and only tweeted when I absolutely needed to for class. I had no followers and only had a few likes on the tweets if I told my friends in person to go like my tweets.

I started this class with zero followers on twitter, and by the end I now have 15. This shows a 100% increase. My Klout score also grew from 10.2 to 25.

While 15 followers is not a large number, I am still proud of that number. That number reflects 15 people who genuinely wanted to follow me, not because I told them to because I am in a social media class. In classes before, I have had people like or favorite my content just so I could get a better grade. For this class, I wanted all my results to be organic and really push myself to put out better content that people would want to like or follow on their own.

I believe one area I struggled in was really having a target audience. Looking back on my tweets, it is clear that I did not clearly define my own personal brand. Going forward, I know now the basics and can work on defining who I really am and continue to grow my following.

One major thing I learned in this class is the power of hashtags. I used to think that hashtags were cheesy or took away from your content. I know realize that hashtags are the gateway to your audience and allow you to engage with people you otherwise may never cross paths with on social media. I now have such an appreciation for hashtags and as you will see, some of my best, most engaging content was all due to the hashtags I used that allowed me to bring a specific audience in.

Through this semester, I also learned the importance of timing. Timing is just as important as the quality of content you are putting out, to make sure the most amount of people will see it and better yet engage with it. I am proud of my timing and learned what worked with my followers. I started off by tweeting at random times during the day. To be more specific, when I remembered I needed to tweet for an assignment. After a few weeks, I realized my best engagement came when I tweeted between 10 am- 11:30 am. Once I figured this out, I saw a lot more engagement on my tweets.

In addition to Twitter, I also started a brand new Instagram for this class. My personal Instagram is the same account I have had since High School. It only consists of pictures of me, my friends, and my family. I wanted to start a brand new account so I could practice posting pictures of places and things and not just people. I started with zero followers and ended up with 19. That number of followers reflects my use of hashtags to bring in certain audiences. My most successful posts on Instagram were all due to the hashtags I used and the accounts and people who clearly closely follow those certain hashtags.

Part 2

Here is a compilation of my best eights tweets and two best Instagram posts. While I will discuss what worked and made each post individually successful, I owe my overall success to the use of hashtags.

This was one of my most liked tweets. I believe it was so successful because I engaged with a target audience through the hashtag #SundayScaries. It is extremely applicable to college students and they can all relate to having to face their homework on Sunday night. And what I have learned is, when people relate they are likely to favorite a tweet or piece of content without even second guessing it.

This tweet was part of the A/B testing assignment that we did. This post used the hashtags #beautiful and #bodypositivity. I gained more likes on this than the other tweet that was identical, but used no hashtags. I believe this also one of my best tweets because it allowed me to take a twitter moment, a piece of content that already existed, and make it my own by commenting on the retweet. Therefore, engaging in a piece of content and putting my own spin on it.

If there is one thing this class taught me, it is that the following surrounding dog hashtags on social media is huge! I owe the success of this tweet to the hashtag #dogsoftwitter. I had never used the hashtag before, but quickly realized that it has a large following and followers are much more likely to favorite your tweet, and having a cute dog also helps.

This was my most favorited tweet. There are a couple of factors that I believe contributed to the overall success. With this gif, I found content that was simple and something that would be viewed as universally funny as well as cute. But what I believe really was successful was that through this gif, I targeted  specific audience. I related this little dog walking in shoes, to dropping of camera equipment at the cage. I took a chance knowing that not all my followers are in Newhouse, know what the Cage is, or even know that BDJ stands for broadcast and digital journalism. It proved though to be successful and people liked it enough to favorite it.

This tweet was successful because of the presentation of my pictures. I think that choosing to take different shots at the farmer’s market was a good idea because they all look good together. When they are put together in a square as you see, they make sense and you can clearly tell they are from a market. The presentation was ascetically  pleasing and my use of hashtags also drew in a specific audience whom I thought would like my pictures.

Though this tweet only received three favorites, I believe that it was one of my best ones. I again, attribute the success to targeting a specific audience. Seniors who are stressed can look at this tweet and relate to their own personal workload. I believe the gif also adds a nice touch and strengthens the tweet. Also, even if someone did not relate or even read the tweet, they may have been inclined to favortie it if they just like or know Tim Gunn.

This was one of my best tweets not because of the number of favorites, but who favorited it. I believe that having MOO, the company where I got my business cards favorite the tweet was a big win. We have done several assignments where we try to reach people or company’s through their handles and we have learned how hard it is to get a response, let alone any form of acknowledgement. Therefore, I was very pleased when I saw that MOO favorited this. I believe it was also successful due to the clear picture and presentation of the cards, as well as bringing in the hashtag #adulting.

This was one of my tweets that was part of the viral content challenge. I think this was one of my best tweets because I believe that I presented my Imgur link well and used hashtags that also drew in a specific audience. I was targeting college students and doing so by poking fun at the idea of a hook up culture, something that is talked about and relatable to college students. I also see this tweet as a win because it was one of the few times I received a retweet on one of my tweets.

This was one of my most liked posts on Instagram. I attribute all the likes to my use of hashtags. As I mentioned earlier, the following on dog hashtags is incredible and I gained so many followers from this one post. I also thought it was awesome, that someone even felt the need to comment “awesome photo”. Before this class, I was use to only my friends commenting on my photos. It is cool that through the use of hashtags you can connect and engage with people you would otherwise never get to.

This was my most liked photo on Instagram. I realized that a lot of engagement comes when you use a hashtag of a specific place as well as #adventure. I realized after the fact, that these 12 likes were mostly from a niche Washington DC travel group. Though, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Through my photo people were able to engage. Also, the two comments on this picture were from two people who tagged each other, and the other responded. I think that it is pretty cool that through my post, other people were able to connect and interact. That I was able to provide content, that they would want to do that through.

Lastly, while this was not a tweet that I used for this class, I attribute it to everything I learned during this semester. I learned that targeting a company through Twitter can be extremely effective, as well as adding hashtags to strengthen what you are trying to say. I tweeted these photos out to Halo Top and through the engagement, Halo Top actually got back to me. I believe this interaction is the pinnacle of everything I learned and practiced doing this semester.

Engagement is so powerful, and from the practice and tools I learned over the past few weeks, I an continue to connect in a new way for the rest of my life.

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