Virtually everyone I see daily – my peers, professors, and friends – use social media in some form. Social media is used to share thoughts, articles, interests, and content. Individuals in my age group like to think that since we have grown up with social media and since or personalities demand it, we have all mastered how to use it. Based on my follower growth and Klout score growth, I now realize that social media has a technique that can be learned and eventually mastered.

For me, the most significant improvement in my social media audience was on Twitter. My goal is to use Twitter as a central location for anyone to find out what I am doing on other platforms. As I went from 45 to 81 followers this semester, I think the the tools and methods learned in Social Media for Communicators played a significant role. For instance, by actually paying attention to hashtags, I felt my engagement increase immensely. Not only did using trending hashtags help me gain impressions, but it made me more inclined to look at other people’s tweets as well. I think it is easy to forget that at the end of the day, these are social medias, and no one will interact with you if you do not interact with them. Being active on social media does not mean you post twice a day, it means you spend time in the space of internet social media. Especially on a platform like YouTube where people are making original content, feedback back and forth is essential. During this class, I did not lose a single subscriber and gained 15. This is most likely because I started paying more attention to my analytics and doing research on which of my videos worked well on which types of audiences. It was also important to realize that the most engaged audience may not be the audience you are trying to reach. For instance, I had a tweet about the show Scream Queens, which i stopped watching because I did not like it. The tweet got 26 favorites and 15 retweets, but it was not the audience I wanted. Rather than Ariana Grande and Nick Jonas fans, I am trying to engage with other content creators and individuals interested in social media.

Something else that was exciting for me was linking together all my social media accounts through Klout. When I started my Klout account, my score was 18 and I only had my Twitter connected. Since I was so new to actively using Twitter, it made sense that my Klout score was so low. As I connected more accounts, my score went from 18 to 58. The biggest reason I decided to connect all my accounts was because as I used external websites to find out my friends’ Klout scores, I began to feel competitive. While I do not see Klout.com as a place I will actually spend much time, it is rewarding to see a tangible number to represent how large and engaged your social reach is.

Overall, I think the reason that I gained so many followers during this semester is that I finally became social media present. There is a lot of talk about someone’s “social media presence” and since I used social media, I assumed I was. However, presence is not just having accounts and sharing links, it is finding a voice and communicating with others.