10 #Winning Tweets

Posted on by Emily Muscarella

Twitter was never my go-to social media platform. If I wanted to get a message out to a large audience of people I would go to another platform, such as Facebook, where I had a larger following. This semester we learned about and experimented with different ways to get a large number of impressions and engagement on shared content. This really opened my eyes to the Twitter world where you could get your message out to hundreds and thousands of people and they didn’t even have to be following you unlike Facebook (mine along with many others’ profiles are private so their hashtag feature does not work the same). Below is a list of my top 10 tweets this semester.

Impressions: 262  Engagements: 20  Engagement Rate: 7.6%

This tweet had the highest number of impressions out of all my tweets this semester. The 20 engagements consisted of 9 detail expands, 4 link clicks, 3 profile clicks, 2 likes, 1 reply, and 1 retweet. I think this tweet received so many impressions and engagements (relative to my other tweets) because I included two widely used hashtags close to the date of the social media event and tagged the Syracuse University Twitter handle (@SyracuseU). The hashtags, #NewsEngagementDay and #NHned, had a large following that day, especially in the Syracuse University and Newhouse School communities. It was also retweeted by the Newhouse NOJ Department Twitter, which has over 1,000 followers, and likely contributed to the higher number of impressions.

Impressions: 249  Engagements: 6  Engagement Rate: 2.4%

I tweeted this link to a BuzzFeed article and used the class hashtag, #NHsmc, because everyone in the class is a college student who might find this article relevant. I, as a college student, often find myself having to cook, but not having enough time to because of homework or other commitments many college students have. I am always looking for ways to make preparing meals easier and I thought the class was a good audience for this piece of content. This tweet had 5 link clicks and 1 retweet (by a college student). My Klout score also hit a 90 day high (23.34) the day after I tweeted this link. I also tweeted this link out again a month later using and used the hashtag #NHsmc along with #recipes. This tweet had 125 impressions and 2 engagements (1 link click and 1 like).

Impressions: 203  Engagements: 10  Engagement Rate: 4.9%

Here I retweeted a Wall Street Journal tweet and added a comment for my followers. This tweet shared an interesting article about how long your iPhone battery would last if it was powered by different things (like body fat). I attached the hashtags #NewsEngagementDay and #NHned because it was News Engagement Day and I wanted to use the trending hashtags to get maximum impressions and engagements. I would say this was successful because this tweet had 3 detail expands, 2 likes, 2 hashtag clicks, 1 reply, 1 retweet, and 1 profile click. I also saw a jump in my Klout score after this tweet (15.13 to 21.66 on October 6, 2015), which is likely a result of the higher engagement I saw on my tweets using the trending hashtags.

Impressions: 106  Engagements: 2  Engagement Rate: 1.9%

I tweeted out a song from SoundCloud here along with a link to a funny YouTube video that uses the song as part of the joke. I used several hashtags like #np and #SoundCloud in order to get my tweet more impressions and engagements by having it appear in the streams for those hashtags that include tweets with similar content so users who see my tweet will likely be the ones interested in finding music. I also used Followerwonk, an application that analyzes your Twitter followers to help find trends within your followers that can be leveraged to help increase engagement and impressions. I found that my followers had peak activity from 2:00- 2:59pm so I tweeted this within that time frame so it would show up in their steams when they were reportedly most active.

Impressions: 98  Engagements: 11  Engagement Rate: 11.2%

Here I used Hootsuite to create a share of voice visual for the keywords, Syracuse University and Duke University. I was happy to see that Syracuse was talked about more on Twitter than Duke. This tweet had 5 media engagements, 4 detail expands, 1 like, and 1 link click and an engagement rate of 11.2%, which is fairly high in comparison to some of my other tweets. I think this is because the Syracuse- Duke basketball rivalry is popular, especially for people who are reading through any of the streams for the hashtags I used.

Impressions: 92  Engagements: 22  Engagement Rate: 23.9%

Here I tested the new Twitter feature, Twitter Polls. This tweet had the highest number of engagements, which included 19 detail expands and 3 hashtag clicks. I think this high amount of engagements (specifically detail expands) was because on October 21, 2015 Twitter users began to have the ability to tweet out Twitter polls (Twitter). I tweeted this poll a week after this feature started being released and I think it peaked users’ interest causing them to expand my tweet and see what the poll was about.

Impressions: 89  Engagments: 6  Engagement Rate: 6.7%

I used an original hashtag in this tweet referencing the Starbucks located on Marshall Street at Syracuse University. This was tweeted on a Wednesday and #WednesdayWisdom is a popular Wednesday hashtag so I used it in an attempt to get my tweet, which included my original hashtag, more views and engagements. The 6 engagements on this tweet included 2 replies (from Syracuse University students), 2 detail expands, 1 like, and 1 hashtag click.

Impressions: 115  Engagements: 3  Engagement Rate: 2.6%

I promoted a Google NGram in this tweet, which is an analytic tool that shows the frequency with which any word or phrase appears in printed material that was published between 1500 and 2015. This specific NGram examines how the social media site names Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace became more frequently used in printed material starting in 2002 and substantially increasing each year from then on. I included the #Facebook, #Twitter, #MySpace, and #nGram in this tweet in order to have it appear in the streams of each hashtag to try to increase impressions and engagement.

Impressions: 103  Engagements: 20  Engagement Rate: 19.4%

This tweet promoted my Viral Content Challenge project. The goal of the tweet was to direct Twitter users to Pinterest to view the content I had created. I think this was one of my most successful tweets because the goal was to get users to engage with it by going to the other platform being promoted and of the 20 engagements, 11 were link clicks. I also mentioned the Netflix problem that had occurred the day before in my tweet in order to try to grab viewers’ attention with a reference to an issue that was tweeted about the day before using the hashtag (which I included) #firstworldproblems.

Impressions: 73  Engagements: 2  Engagement Rate: 2.7%

Using Google Trends, I found that McDonald’s announcement of all-day breakfast was a trending topic on October 7, 2015. I used this information to call out another brand, Chick-fil-A, who does not offer all-day breakfast. I did this because other brands like Denny’s and IHOP, who have always served breakfast all day, were interacting with McDonald’s after its announcement so I was trying to pull in another big brand. The engagements and impressions on this tweet were not as high as I had expected given that this was a trending topic. However, I think if I had used a hashtag that was associated with the announcement, like #AllDayBreakfast, the engagements and impressions would have been higher.

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