The Highlights: How I Took Over the Twitter World For a Semester

Posted on by Matthew Wieselthier

This semester has been a huge growth in my social media presence, both through this class and also help I have gotten from my new position on campus as the Sports Director at CitrusTV, which raised my profile and made me more accessible on social media.  My Twitter gained 23 followers over the semester, and at times got up to over 500 followers.  This was particularly helped when Syracuse made its NCAA Tournament run, which helped me because I was tweeting a lot about the run and helped me gain followers that I sadly lost afterwards.

My Klout score also demonstrated how I developed in my social media strategy.  It started the semester at 38, and is currently at 47.  At times during the semester, it got all the way up to 50, which was a very proud achievement for me as I felt my impact growing in the social media realm.

I definitely noticed a change in my social media strategy over the past semester, and certain things were more effective then others.  One big thing was using a lot more hashtags and tagging people, and that helped get my engagement and numbers up.  What also helped was talking about topics in the moment, which increased my engagement.  Here are some of the highlights:

For this first tweet, it was my most effective of the semester and that I have every had thanks to the timeliness and hashtags that I used.  This tweet was focused around the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics.  The dancers were a huge talking point during the Parade of Nations among my friends, so I decided to tweet about it as a possibility of it being significant to other watching.  I also utilized hashtags which were not a huge part of my Twitter strategy before my semester.

The next tweet was along with the in-class activity about activism on Twitter.  Our group decided to focus on giraffes going extinct, which is the origin for this tweet.  I decided to focus on an already created hashtag that has some traction because it would get views (#SaveTheGiraffes).  I also thought that adding an emoji would be an effective strategy to help boost the views and engagement the tweet would get.  Finally, I added an article to the end to increase engagement as people would want to click on the article.

This next tweet was done for an assignment where we had to post multiple pictures.  I found this effective because my friends love “The Dude,” which is a part of a game that I got over the holidays.  It was effective using the hashtag #thedude but also just connecting to my follower base, which increased engagement.

I found that the Follow Friday tweet was a great opportunity for me to use my position as Sports Director to couple with a class assignment to gain attention for the station.  I also knew that I could add an extra hashtag by including #FollowMonday to get more engagement with more people that could potentially be looking to follow people on other days.

This next tweet is focused a lot on hitting current topics, particularly with all the issues between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.  Mark Zuckerberg was dealing with issues in his questioning in front of Congress.  I think a lot of hashtags helped this tweet, but the biggest drawback was that in trying to get the tweet out quickly, I spelt Mark Zuckerberg’s name wrong, which did not help the engagement.

Another helpful thing was interaction with people in a live atmosphere with the Periscope Challenge.  This had a lot of interaction with the public, especially in rewatchability.  It also was just hashtags, which made it easier to reach the public.

This tweet was part of the GIF assignment for class.  I feel that this worked for a couple reasons.  First, it was timely with using the #SuperBowl and talking about how the economy was doing at this time.  The other reason I feel it worked was because I used myself in the GIF, which I feel helped with how interactive people were with the tweet.

This next tweet once again took advantage of my role as Sports Director as well as who my follower base is.  The tweet focused on the anchors we had for the show and trying to build on their personalities, particularly before the show.  This again was with a lot of people that interact with my Twitter so it increased engagement.

This was the one tweet that was not from the class but was possibly my most meaningful was this tweet that promoted my friend Noah after he got to make an appearance on CBS Sports.  This was very effective because Noah was trending thanks to his connection to his dad, Ian Eagle, and what CBS did on social media with both of them calling the Syracuse vs. Miami basketball game.  It was also great to be able to talk about my friend on Twitter.

This final tweet was from my Viral Challenge campaign and was promoted on Twitter, which is why it got more traction and impressions than other tweets.  I also think the hashtags I used were timely, which helped me get more engagement.

Overall, this semester has been a huge success thanks to what I have learned about using variety in my tweets and especially learning how to tweet along with events, something I will continue into the future with my Twitter strategies.

 

Leave a Reply