Twitter and Platform Growth throughout Semester

Posted on by Amelia Elliot

At the beginning of this course, Twitter was foreign to me, I hadn’t stepped on to use the platform since my sophomore year of high school. I went through a phase in middle school where I used twitter to engage with other Justin Bieber fans. There were so many pages about what he was up to, and as someone who had just seen Never Say Never, I was totally obsessed. I had a blackberry and Twitter was really easy to use, so I was checking it non stop. I set up texting notifications, that way whenever I was mentioned in a tweet, I could respond right away. After my obsession with Bieber faded out, and I realized I would never end up with him, it was a far off dream, I stopped using Twitter. I would go on the platform very sporadically, like maybe once every six months, but I couldn’t get back into it. I don’t follow a lot of people, but since people are tweeting so frequently there was so much content. I felt bombarded with information that I didn’t necessarily care about.

On the first day of class, I chose to keep my old twitter account, because it was active. I had a somewhat steady follower base. I was curious to see how I could grow the amount of people who followed me. On January 17, I started with 89 followers and I grew to 118. I followed people from the class, and some influencers and people who I’m interested in. My klout score is 22. I tried to retweet and like content I was interested in. I don’t necessarily think this worked. I did seem to get the most engagement on Twitter when I tweeted about similar topics. When we did the viral content assignment, I targeted Fortnite users. I used hashtags I thought they would be interested, and many of them favorited my tweets. This was an accomplishment, and I felt successful knowing I could reach a specific audience. Another time I received the most feedback and favorites/replies was for one of the homework assignments. On February 25, the assignment was to tweet someone who was in a field we were interested in. I chose to tweet at Freeform’s Vice President of Social Media digital marketing and synergy. I follow Freeforms Instagram and I really liked the content they were posting. It seemed fit to contact the person behind it. This retweet received 5 favorites, and I got a reply from the VP herself, Dana Elizabeth Ganz. Her tweet also got 7 favorites replying to me.

When I reflect back on what worked and what didn’t, general hashtags that I thought would be popular weren’t. They didn’t target likes or favorites. On Monday’s I used hashtags like Monday Motivation, and on Wednesday’s I frequently used hashtags like Hump Day. When I tweeted about the snowy weather in Syracuse, I tried to engage the community. I used hashtags like #SU, #CUSE #GoOrange, but I didn’t see much engagement. I’m not sure why. I know I don’t usually follow hashtags and maybe other people don’t either. There was a phase on Instagram about 5 years ago, where everyone used “Tags For Likes.” These were about 40  hashtags tags one could add to their Instagram picture, and it ensured liked. Because this was so relevant at the time, everyone regularly checked these hashtags. Since then, I haven’t seen hashtags being that successful to target people. As mentioned before, I only received engagement and favorites with hashtags that were extremely specific. In the future, I would only follow people within the same field, and tweet about trends and news within that field. This would probably allow me to make some connections as well.

Here are my top 10 Tweets from 1/17-4/18. I also received 13,000 impressions during this time. During this period, I received 143 impressions per day.

For this tweet, I engaged with the VP of social media digital marketing and synergy at Freeform. I received 10 profile clicks as a result, and 1 retweet, and 680 impressions, and 25 engagements. I think I also got a reply (see below) because I complimented something specific this person did.

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2. This received 242 impressions, and 18 engagements. I wonder if I would have received more if I added some Syracuse hashtags in there.

3. I think this received 5 favorites because of the specific hashtags I used. Out of the five people who favorited this, 3 were gamers. This received 233 impressions and 15 engagements.

4. This tweet went out when it was randomly 70 and sunny in the middle of February. I used a lot of hashtags but I think I could have used other ones to draw more of an audience in. It received 308 impressions and 11 engagements in total (8 media engagements).

 

5. This tweet went out during the Olympics. I remember being surprised when I didn’t get more engagement. There’s a feature on Twitter that allows you to tag people when you add photos. I wasn’t aware of this and thought it was cool to be able to tag these athletes. This received 281 engagements and 11 impressions.

 

7. For this tweet it was Oscar’s season and I tried to engage people with hashtags. This tweet received 220 impressions and 1 favorite.

9. This next tweet I put out during National Women’s Day, but it didn’t receive as much engagement as I thought. I received 202 impressions and 11 media engagements, and 4 clicks to the hashtags I used.

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