Spring 2020 – A Reflection by Sam Bull

Posted on by Samuel Bull

I was super excited to take this class going into the semester. I’ve always had an interest in using Twitter to send a message out to the masses and ever since I spent time in Los Angeles interning in the social media marketing world, I’ve wanted to examine pursuing this space as a career path and this class definitely allowed me to do that. In the beginning, I was honestly hesitant about using my own Twitter account mainly because I didn’t want to swarm my feed with content that doesn’t fit my tone and voice (which I had to do for a class my Junior year) but I soon realized that I would be able to post for the class while keeping my Twitter-sona intact at the same time.

Going into the month of January, I had a WHOPPING 343 followers on Twitter, mostly made up of friends from high school and college. Throughout my posting during the semester, both for class and for my own amusement, I gained about 29 followers (according to Twitter Analytics), made up of both people from class and others at the University, bringing my total follower count to 372. Doing the math, my followers went up about 9% over the course of the semester which, in hindsight, isn’t a HUGE improvement but it shows that the content that I want to get across to my followers is obviously resonated with them, getting more steady interaction with my tweets than I was used to.

I feel like, throughout what I was posting during for the homework assignments, I was able to adapt what I typically have known as my own voice towards getting the messages needed across for class. A lot of the content I posted for this class both, in my opinion, fulfilled the assignments while also maintaining the type of persona I’ve created for myself on the platform.

The whole point of this ICYMI post was to not only keep my voice while posting for that specific class assignment but also to gain more attention for the meme I posted a year ago. Due to that fact, my meme actually did get a small bump in engagement, while also getting the actually #ICYMI post some love, it seemed to be a win-win situation.

By Tweeting at user Caucasian James, I was both trying to engage a person who’s voice I admire on Twitter, but also utilize his popularity among my follower base in order to gain engagement. In the end, I wasn’t able to get as much engagement as I wanted (let alone a shoutout from him) but I think it still did well. The meme for the viral challenge (without the NHsmc tag, unfortunately) was attempting to do the same thing. I initially wanted engagement from the creators used within the post but soon got over the fact that I never did because the post was doing so well on its own. I was trying to make it as relatable to the current situation as I could for people my age and it seemed to have worked.

In the same vein as the previous tweets, I was initially attempting to receive engagement from the host of the game show, Sean Evans, above all else with this tweet. Fortunately enough for me, I was able to tag the right accounts and use the right hashtag because I received a small bit of engagement from the Official Hot Ones The Game Show account in the form of a like. While I wasn’t able to get as much love for this tweet as I wanted, I actually believe that this is the best-formatted post I made all semester.

In trying to keep my voice, I was also able to use the sarcastic tone that I often find myself tweeting in to my advantage. By calling attention to the fact that I was posting specifically for this class, the posts not only got attention from those in the class, but people that I know from my high school even began liking the posts. While the Tweetdeck post was trying to be more comical than anything, the collage post with pictures from a Duke Tailgate earlier that week was attempting to engage my follower base above all else, which it proved to do. I think it was because of that it became one of my most-liked tweets from this semester.

In the same way the tailgate post was attempting to gain attention from my Syracuse University peers, the post I made from my beer and wine class was trying to do the same thing. Fortunately enough for me, this class has been extremely popular among seniors, so I knew I was more than likely going to be receiving engagement from at least a couple of my peers. By using #CollegeEducation and #GoCuse, I was also able to keep the voice that I’ve created for myself while still remaining relatable.

This particular post doesn’t actually have the class tag in it but the thread below the original tweet does, that still counts right? The reason I wanted to include this in the final analysis is because this was the first tweet where I actually saw engagement due to the class. As dumb as the meme itself is, it actually got some laughs out of people in class when we were discussing it (if I’m remembering correctly) which is super satisfying to me. I can only hope to not only continue to tweet in this same manner in the future but have that type of engagement in the replies below them as well.

These last two tweets were actually my first two for the semester and it shows how I was attempting to keep my voice while also making sure I was meeting the requirements for this class. The video of Matty Healy (the lead singer of The 1975) was posted right after I had decided not to create a separate account for the class, so I was really trying to keep my voice and tone intact. Same with the whiteboard video, I was trying to remain as true to my Twitter persona as I possibly could. In the end, I think both posts were great starts towards the type of content I posted over the course of the semester.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this class and the assignments we had to do. Being able to use my social media accounts to not only gain “clout” but also further my education is/was something I never thought I’d be able to do while at Syracuse but now that I have, I think I’m all the better for it going into the communications industry.

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