Was I Popping on Social Media?

Posted on by Summer Thompson

Part 1:  Influence

For this journey in Social Media, I really set out to find how to really garner the RIGHT type of attention on social media and create good content along the way. In doing this, I sought the help of professor Grygiel and her social media class to figure this out and also make some amazing post while I was at it.

Throughout the class, I was really able to grow my social media more then I would’ve expected, especially on Twitter. At the beginning of class, I thought that I would gain between three and ten followers, mainly because of the connections that I would garner in class but I seemed to surpass this and went from 586 followers at the beginning of class to 609 followers by the end. This was a gain of 23 followers and it continues to grow as we speak. It was really cool to see the growth that I was able to accomplish without really doing any personal promoting. Yes, I was probably more active then I have been in several years with my social media but I did not actually have to put out into the Twitter world  “Hey, go follow me!”. It seems like I was naturally able to garner followers by just being myself and posting content that my viewers were able to enjoy.

As you can see in my Imgur post, over the past 28 days I have been able to keep a pretty steady flow of followers and interaction on my account. Although my Tweets and Profile visits went down, I was still able to gain lots of Tweet Impressions and Followers. I think this is due in part to keeping my Twitter active like we spoke about in class. This semester, I am also apart of another social media class that keeps me active on social media as well as curating my own natural content.

Unfortunately, further into my project, I seem to have misplaced lots of my tweets because of tweet delete…. Even though I lost most of my tweets, I still hope that you can see some of the influence that I brought to both Twitter and Instagram.

Part 2: Execution

Now its time to look at what content I actually put out and how did I go about it. One of the most important things to me when doing a project or assignment like the ones that we had in class is making the content that I posted to be both genuine and authentic. When creating content like this for class, you are always straddling the line between authenticity and generic.  This is why I’m constantly going over the content that I post to make sure that it is not only going to get me the five or ten points assigned to it but to also make sure that it sounds like me and won’t leave my friends saying things like, ” Is this really what Summer thinks?” or,”Is this for one of her classes?”. In all honesty, this did happen to me a few times at the beginning but I really begin to find my perfect balance between authentic and generic as the class went on.

One of my most recent tweets was me actually seeking a job! Since Twitter is such a well-known site that many businesses already look at when planning on hiring any new employees, I wanted to make sure that they not only knew that I was open to being hired but that I also had nothing to hide on my social media accounts. Unfortunately, I have not had any major hits yet for job opportunities in the Syracuse area but I hope that as my Twitter community continues to expand, I might follow or get a follow from the right person and land a semester-long job!

Another post that garnered a lot of attention was actually one of our last group assignments where we chose a hashtag that meant something to all of our group members and tweeted about it to bring awareness to the twitter community.

The hashtag that we used for this assignment was #Bodyconfidence. We thought this was a great hashtag for all women, especially those who are at a college level going through everyday issues like the ” freshman fifteen” and constantly being judged by their appearance and not what they actually bring to the table. I really wanted to post this specifically on my social media because I am currently a cheerleader at Syracuse University and have a lot of followers who are as well. Being in a position like that, wearing the uniforms that we do, you have to have a certain level of #bodyconfidence in order feel good in what you wearing in front of 20,000 people. I love my team and love our outfits but know that there does require a certain level of confidence when it comes to it. I think this is why I received several retweets and likes on this post because many girls go through the same things with their bodies in different ways or situations.

One post that unfortunately did not gain the attention that I wanted it to was my viral content challenge meme of Lebron. It’s so funny because everytime someone mentions seeing it on my social media they seem to garner the same feeling toward Mcdonals and the meme that I had, but unfortunately, it did not go viral as I had hoped.

Overall the past couple weeks, I see that I was able to get over 560 views on my Imgur post but I definitely thought that I would get a lot more when first creating my meme. I think a big factor into why my meme did not get as much attention as other classmates did because I actually changed my meme midway through the assignment. My firstmeme actually did way better, 860 + views, then my second meme but I ended up switching memes because the class did not give me that positive of feedback when I showed my meme. Although I did get three or for green marks on my sheet, I felt that I could do better, A.K.A the Mcflurry meme was invented. If I were to do it again or give myself feedback for the future, it probably would have been to stick to my gut and continue on with my original meme. I definitely would have seen an increase in views, especially if I was able to promote the post and given it my five dollars.  I also would have probably had more clever or eye-catching tweets then the ones that I posted. A lot of times, when I would go to create my tweets early in the day to be posted at a certain time, they would be more generic than those that I had to post randomly throughout the day.

One post that did way better then I thought it would was actually this post about UV, my housing this year at Syracuse.  I thought it would be a cool way to show someone the inside of a UV apartment. Unfortunately, the image did not upload the way I wanted it to on Twitter but ended up getting a lot more attention then I expected.

As you can see by my Tweet Activity I actually got a lot of engagement, over 50, and impressions, over 500. Because of this, one thing that I would say when posting something like this is YOU NEVER KNOW WHO WILL VIEW IT! If I would have known that this post would do this well, I probably would have taken more time with my #StreetView image.

For my viral content challenge, this was the tweet that got the most twitter engagement. When I look at tweets like this and compare it the other ones that I sent out with this meme, I like to look at the different captions and hashtags that I attached to the image to see reasons as to why it probably did better than others. I think one reason is because of the wording of my tweet. I used words like ” relate” because I wanted to relate to my viewers and get feedback from them about my post.

In order to keep my social media fun and entertaining and not just focus on class related things, I decided to ass in several tweets that were focused on things that I love or enjoy. One of my favorite things to watch or to look at while on social media is sports. This is one of my favorite things to look at on social media so you know I love to post when I see something interesting or exciting on social media. For example, I knew that this retweet would garner a lot of attention on my social media because it is a well-known basketball coach as well as it being basketball season.

These next two-post are not my own, but content that I put on my page in order to help other teammates reach their goals on sharing and posting. With both tweets, I retweeted them and sent them out to my followers to view.

In the end, I was very happy with how much exposure I got on my Instagram. I decided to start a new Instagram to see what organic followership I could gain. Overall, I was able to get up to 68 new followers. I was able to garner followers through good pictures, hashtags, captions, and filters. I’m thinking that I will continue to develop this Instagram page and use it for more of a professional page and to share more business-related content.

For my Instagram, one of the things that I wanted to do was to make sure that I constantly kept promoting my imgur meme, so I attached this image as one of my posts while also sharing the link in my bio. I thought this would help to get more viewership.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed working with my social media accounts and learning how to use them from a business standpoint instead of a purely social. I hope that I can continue to use this techniques and skills that I have learned in order to keep this follow train going.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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