Audience Analysis
The account I have decided to analyze is my main Twitter account which is called “AccioPotato”. This is a fan account for films and series, but it’s mainly dedicated to Harry Potter related tweets. The account started out in November 2011 as a personal private account named “RahafJammal”. At first, I only used the account to follow my real-life friends, but after I started following more people who happened to interest me, I then started tweeting more Harry Potter related stuff and then I started gaining followers who also happened to be HP fans.
The account has 2,712 followers, who are mostly HP fans or people who are into series and movies. The audience has developed unsteadily. At first, the pace of the people who were following this account was extremely slow only because I was still new and exclusive to the field. Then the number of followers increased at a particular point during the summer of 2012 where I received my first hundred retweets on a tweet which was about JK Rowling at the Olympics. After that, the number of followers went back to increasing slowly (2013). In that phase, the number of my tweets decreased and I almost decided to stop using Twitter, but then in 2014 I went back to using the account on a daily basis and the increase in number of followers was at its peak where I used to gain almost 6–7 followers per day. The number of followers kept increasing steadily until I started fall semester this year and I stopped being constantly active on Twitter, hence now my followers are decreasing and the number of unfollows are increasing.
Over the past six months, the most popular and widely shared posts are:
These posts are very similar to the things I used to tweet during my peak phases, but because of the fact that I used to be constantly tweeting and making sure these posts are made during peak hours, people used to notice them. Now the number of my tweets (which vary between 2–3 to none per day) don’t grab anyone’s attention, and I’ve lost track of the peak hours on Twitter.
The age range of my audience is between 14 year olds and 20 year olds, 75% of them are females and 25% are males.
They all share a similar interest for music and movies/series.
Many of my followers who used be extremely influential on Twitter have deactivated their accounts. However, a very influential person — who also happens to be my friends — remains, and his name is “Htothe Potter”, he has 49.4K followers. His audience is mostly HP, Hunger Games fans and celebrities fans. From time to time he tweets about different movies and even songs. He started off with a very small amount of followers, but his constant tweeting and engaging with other people lead to the spread of his posts which helped him reach the number of followers he has now. However, he doesn’t get to tweet personal things, his main purpose became only to please his audience.
User statistics help shed light on the variety of reasons for these accounts to have such large numbers of followers. These numbers relate the followers and the audience to the account itself and help in pointing out the common things these people share. These numbers show how the different social capitals are formed; through bonds shared thoughts and common interests. My personal account, AccioPotato hasn’t helped me reach my goals through social capital. However, HtothePotter’s account has; the large number of followers on this account lead to the WB Studios to contact the user and personally invite him to the launching of the Harry Potter studio tour in the UK including many more prizes. Not all people who have a large number of followers get to benefit from what the social capital has to offer, but you never if you’re lucky enough.
