Personal Influence Growth: The Professional Versus Personal Twitter Struggle

Posted on by Gabrielle Veira

At the beginning of this course, I was working from my personal Twitter account. I already had a solid following on that account, so I wanted to see how this class might affect the following I already established. However, a few weeks later, I decided to create another account that would be for professional use. This means I started completely from scratch and the 600 followers I had from my personal account quickly went to 0 with my professional one.

 

Although it was hard to start over, I was able to get 20 followers by November 29. I tried to avoid looking for my friends to follow me since I wanted this account to have a different voice than my personal one. I wanted to see if I could get followers that were interested in the career field I hope to infiltrate after graduation or were already involved themselves. I did end up getting a lot more followers that attended Newhouse than I expected and, in my opinion, that was a success. My Klout account also started at 10 as a result of my new Twitter, but ended up with a score of 31 by the same date.

 

What worked and didn’t work

 

I think what worked the most with increasing my number of followers was that I was using hashtags that already had a lot of engagement. Specifically hashtags I had to use for other classes, it made me communicate with other Newhouse students and other public relations professionals, which helped build my network. Additionally, quote tweeting also helped increase my influence and followers because it added me into a conversation. What didn’t really work was that I didn’t have the foundation of my friends to help begin my following. That was the major contrast I noticed between my professional and personal Twitter accounts. Also, the fact that my personal Twitter already has an established voice whereas my professional one is still trying to find its voice.

 

While doing my analysis, I decided to compare the amount of replies, retweets, likes and engagement rate I received on my professional Twitter versus my personal during the same time period. The results are as follows:

 

Professional Twitter:

            72 impressions per day

2.0% engagement rate

9 retweets (0 retweets per day)

30 likes (0 likes per day)

5 replies (0 replies per day)

 

Personal Twitter:

            1.1K impressions per day

3.7% engagement rate

177 retweets (2 retweets per day)

1.1K likes (12 likes per day)

152 replies (2 replies per day)

 

It’s clear that my influence on my personal Twitter is much stronger due to my following and possibly how long it has been activated. However, I also think what works with my personal Twitter is that the tweets don’t feel forced, but are more natural and are relatable to my audience (college-aged, young adults). Also, I don’t tend to use many hashtags (which a lot of people in my generation tend to avoid unless it is for an award show or a class) and use Twitter as more of a way to casually communicate and share or discuss information rather than trying to go viral and get a lot of engagement. I believe the relaxed approach I’ve taken to Twitter on my personal account has turned out to be a really successful technique and has garnered substantial engagement and impressions.

 

Top 10 Tweets

Despite the difference in engagement between my two accounts, there were a few tweets featured on my professional Twitter that performed very well.

#1

Engagement 13, Likes 1

My top tweet was my promoted tweet, which is why I believe it did so well. There was media attached that encouraged the viewer to click on the link to see further and the phrase “different day, same mood” is relatable and a trend in itself as a result of older tweets with a similar tagline. All of these strategies put together helped this tweet gain the attention it did.

 

#2

Engagement 43, Likes 8

This tweet was pinned to my Twitter profile and was able to garner more engagement because it is my very first tweet shown. Even on my personal Twitter, I have noticed that my pinned tweet will continue to get engagement even months after it was originally posted because of its place on my profile. Also, I think that the media involved in the tweet produced more clicks out of curiosity about where the link led. Pinning tweets on your profile is definitely a skill/technique that can be used to gain more attention to a specific tweet you want people to see.

 

But is Chipotle even worth being broke over anymore? #NHsmc https://t.co/8pfpmmQWEu

— Gabrielle Veira (@Gmveira) November 6, 2017

 

#3

Engagements 29, Likes 1

#TakeAKnee made a significant impact on the engagement of this tweet since it was already a trending topic on Twitter. So when people searched the hashtag, my tweet would be incorporated in the search and encourage interaction. Also, because I embedded pictures with examples of celebrities using the hashtag into my tweet, it prompted users to click to see who was advocating for the cause. I can conclude this because 24 of my engagements went toward media engagement.

 

#4

Engagement 5, Likes 2

I believe time also plays an important role on the success of a tweet and because I posted this tweet early, it was one of the very first tweets some people saw when waking up. When I thought of this tweet I wanted to do something that was going to relate to my followers (mostly seniors in college) and was timely.

 

#5

Engagement 2, Likes 2

Thinking about the end of the semester is relatable to college students in any year. I didn’t have a real thought behind this tweet other than that it was something my friends and I were currently discussing. Looking back, if I had added a gif or a funny picture along with the tweet, I would have more engagement. As we’ve learned in class, media can have a lot of effect on the success of a tweet, especially if it is humorous.

 

#6

Engagement 2, Media Views 21

The number of views is important here because it shows that my followers did take the time to look at the video, but if I had done something a little differently, I might have encouraged more of them to actually like my tweet. What is interesting is I did a similar tweet to this on my personal account and it resulted in 10 likes, so it is apparent that I have two slightly different audiences on each of my accounts as stated earlier.

 

#7

Engagement 6, Likes 1

I was surprised on the engagement on this tweet because initially, I didn’t feel like it really connected to any of my audience other than that it was close to Halloween. A majority of my engagement came from the hashtag itself, which I think makes it hard to really see how much engagement you truly have since it is only targeted toward the small group of people using the hashtag. However, I think this also shows how helpful a hashtag can be when looking for engagement.

 

#8

Engagement 7, Likes 2

I believe the topic of this blog was what inspired the engagement because society is constantly having the debate of whether or not social media is fostering more communication between us or less. Also, the fact that the webcard showed that it was based on the Newhouse Expressions page probably caught the attention of Newhouse attendees.

#9

Engagement 0

Although this tweet did not do well, it ended up in my top tweets because it had 50 impressions despite the 0 engagement. I think this is interesting to note and shows me that it is probably the wording of the tweet or even the time it was tweet that resulted in the lack of engagement. For this post, I used Tweetdeck since it was a part of my viral content campaign

#10

Engagement 2, Media Views 23

As for my other short video/gif, my number of views does not aline with my engagement. However, this was my very first tweet from this account and based on that, I do think that it did pretty well because of the NHsmc hashtag. Even though I do not include a lot of hashtags in my every day, personal tweets, I’ve learned from creating this account that hashtags can definitely be helpful when you want to get the attention of a particular audience.

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