Progress Update 11/30

Last week I outlined my success, shortcomings and plans for the next phase of the project. This week organization has gotten much better and so has picking and choosing content to engage with.

In terms of organizing i started screen shotting note worthy tweets as they happened rather than scrolling back. I created a separate folder on my phone as well as my desktop to store the information quick and easily. I’m finding this makes writing the progress update as well as the power point so much easier as a whole.

In terms of picking content I tried to stick to things that I had real opinions or feelings about because content with no meaning usually goes no place. I also found that evenings are the best time to tweet because they gain the most views. So i’ve been tweeting during the day but mainly engaging at night.

This weeks highlights

This week (albeit a short one) was more successful in terms of my content getting viewed. Though I haven’t gained many more followers my tweets gain more views per hour than they did last week. The most noted tweets this week came on friday the 27th after I tweeted out about Planned Parenthood in the wake of the tragedy in Colorado. I did not tweet directly at anyone or state a clear opinion I merely provided fact about the organization. In the first half hour alone these two tweets had gained 100+ views and engagements. tIMG_2751 IMG_2752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To date this pair of tweets has been my most successful and I plan to implement this idea in the final week of my project. I thought this project would be a lot more difficult but I’m finding that its really not much different from what I usually did except now i’m doing it with an agenda or strategy and purpose. I think i’ve progressed nicely and I will have a decent amount of data to draw on for the final product.

Looking Ahead

This week will be the final leg of the project experiment phase. The last week will be about cross posting content from other sites to my twitter feed and though I have done this before I will focus on it more in addition to my hashtags and engagement strategies. Originally i was playing with the idea of using hoot suite or tweet deck but i’ve shied away from them because i want to stay genuine to the projects main focus which is twitter. I honestly did not like tweet deck and hoot suite takes a bit of getting used to and I don’t want to taint my projects results because I’m not familiar with the platform. SO! In the final week it will be a hashtagging, topic engaging and cross posting blitz. I hope to have enough data to compare to the sources I based my proposal on as well as the strategies I utilized. I will also break down my final results into categories instead of doing it by week. So far my main content engagement has been with trending topics so I need another week to balance it out.

UPDATE FOR 12/3

-live tweeting professionally (look for local event related to social media, digital, etc.) and compare to personal live tweeting, check analytics
-revisit 3rd party analytics for further insights (especially Hootsuite)
-play around with Jetpack (for analytics) for ePortfolio
-other efforts to increase engagement through social media (your work via Dept. of Education)
-analog efforts for branding, networking (e.g., business cards)

After meeting with Professor Belli I realized there are some important things i’ve been doing but neglecting to mention. So as mentioned last week and with Professor Belli I wanted to toy around with a third party app, I hated tweet deck but i’m going to give hoot suite another run and see if scheduling tweets makes a difference in my user engagement. Live tweeting is also something i’m looking to do but I havent yet found a program or event that fits in with my account or my time schedule so I may just do scheduling tweets as the last element of the project. Jetpack the plug in was pretty complicated and I havent yet gotten access to the instructions so i’ve let it be for now for the sake of time.

Other related elements that i’ve been creating are, business cards to promote my accounts and my brand and i’ve been asked to help manage the NYC DOE district 21 twitter account, which I created for them last week. By applying some of the strategies to that account i’m hoping to be able to get them decent recognition and foot traffic.

Download (PPTX, 1016KB)

 

(POWER POINT NOT YET UPDATED 12/2)

Progress Update 11/25

I began my project a week ago and to be honest I lacked confidence in myself and the success I could bring to it. I combined and tweaked some of my strategies due to time constraints but they’re all still of the same genre. So my updated timeline looks more like this,

Week #1- Leverage trending topics. I will explore the moments and trending sections of twitter and engage in the conversation for at least 2 of them per day. Boost visibility by tweeting with at least three content based hashtags that represent a call to action.

Week #2- Fuel my profile with shared content. I will share and comment on popular stories to attract or raise questions about the content.Branch out. I will locate and attempt to engage with three professionals in my desired career field (marketing).

Week #3- Cross post. In the last week I will share my content from linkedin and open lab on my twitter to show professional work on my twitter feed as well.

Week #4- For the last week I will gather and assess my data, see which week had the largest engagement and overall by how much (if any) my engagement increased.

I mainly combined similar strategies and will be continuing to apply all strategies as I incorporate new ones. I started out with 27 followers, less than 50 views per tweet, 5 or less mentions per month and had never been added to any lists.

What i’ve done to date

So far, as I touched upon in class last week my tactics have been rather successful. As of 11/23 (One week since I began) I have,

  • Gained 6 new followers
  • Been retweeted 4 times
  • Been favorited 7 times
  • Added to two lists
  • Mentioned 2 times
  • Had an all time high record of 101 interactions per tweet

I actually surprised myself with how much my tweeting and interactions took off by using hashtags and joining into trending conversations. I chimed in about Charlie Sheen, Heart Health, Obama, Womens rights just to name a few. It was actually pretty fun and interesting, because I got to read all these people’s ideas on the subject to scroll through a category.

The biggest obstacle so far has been without a doubt keeping my content up to date with the ever fluid topics of twitter. I go to class or work for a few hours and now what’s on my timeline is eons old. So thats a challenge for sure. Otherwise I haven’t had any major roadblocks that I see as a threat to my project.

Critically though I need to be more organized and write down the results over every day instead of scrolling back through my timeline as thats really time consuming. I also want to sit down and really read through hoot suite and see how I can get that to really work for me because right now I still end up back on the twitter app because I’m so versed in it.

This week I think I did a good job of being on more regularly and reading through content instead of scrolling like a madman. Moments without a doubt makes it easier to see stories but harder to interact with individual tweets so I have to move away from using that and stick to the trending topics tool which is a little harder but necessary for this project.

Moving forward and looking ahead I look forward to trying the next strategy and implementing it in addition to week ones. This week I am sharing content like crazy, news stories, blogs, journal articles and more and then commenting or interacting with it by asking questions or giving feedback. I hope to have an even keel of both informative news sources and op ed interest pieces to balance out the kinds of interaction I get.