Analyzing My Twitter Account
Having been using Twitter for a few months now, I got to learn a lot about the way social media works and how people interact based on issues they are mostly interested in. I will be analyzing my experience with Twitter based on the impressions, responses, and the availability and relation of the people I decided to follow.
From my 51 tweets, I have gotten 7.0K impressions. Among the responses were 22 retweets, 57 likes, and 3 replies. The top tweets that got most of the engagements were three about the Palestinian Cause including remembering Rachel Corrie and supporting #IsraeliApartheidWeek, six about the live tweeting event of the movie screening, Nour, and 11 others discussing things related to my major, communication, or related to social media class. Moreover, I got 20 followers throughout these months. I started with two followers that were friends of mine, but from then on it was all new followers that made the choice of following me based on certain tweets they liked or probably seeing my interests. When tweeting about human rights or something related to that, for example, I got a few organizations that are related to such. My account received new followers in a slow pace, but the number has changed since I have started being active moderately. I had a few organizations follow me due to some of my tweets about professional topics related to my major. There was even a band from Brooklyn that followed me because of my interest in humanitarian events. In other words, my followers are not random, they all are part of the topics that I discuss in my tweets.
When it comes to the people and pages that I have decided to follow, it started off as broad, but I later on tried to focus on certain groups. Firstly, I followed major news sources like The Times, The Washington Post, and BBC because I thought it would help me be knowledgable of the events happening all around the world to see what is influencing people and the reasons behind people’s behaviors. Later on, I started digging up successful communication and marketing companies to be updated on the newest trends in such fields and major projects. From them I got to follow people whose expertise is in social media and help people learn more about the skills needed. To build my identity and fully try to be interactive in my circle, I started following Palestinian and women organizations and news sources. I thought I could try to link the dots and see how I can contribute to social media as a Palestinian woman who is majoring in communication. From the 200 people that I follow, the most active is The Independent, with 681K tweets. However, the most informative and useful people that helped me get a better aspect of how to do things were AJ+, Campaign, AdAge, Advertising Week, and Time. Their tweets were the ones that felt relatable and most engaging. In general, people tweet all kinds of news which gives a lot of sources and ways in which I can approach certain topics. The amount of tweets in relation to the content that I found useful was a bit arbitrary in news but specific in the pages about all sorts of communication.
Another thing I have done is create 3 lists which isn’t much, and I haven’t really tackled how I can really benefit from them. When creating my first, Palestinian Cause, I decided to join 4 lists related to the fields I’m interested in. Weeks later, it hadn’t occurred to me to check them. I then decided to create two other lists, Women in Media and Communications. The three lists I decided to create were to further specify my identity and create a circle of interests and check if people would subscribe to any and relate. In addition, I wanted to vary things that are focused on in media, such as the communication that is the unseen work that goes viral, women’s call for equality that has been a huge topic, and a humanitarian and Middle Eastern cause that can link to my background. The members I added were mainly from the people I already follow and from searches, I added others based on how relatable they are. The lists I had subscribed to helped me add a few extra, almost 13, members to my Communications list and that also helped in me knowing more about the field and what to focus on. Even though I haven’t been truly involved in the lists and got zero subscribers so far, the lists actually was key to help me know what I want to focus on career wise and how I want to be seen and known as to the people that would want to check my profile. It also plays a part in knowing what people do and what trends to follow. The members are really active that I usually catch up on it all through my feed.
After evaluating my Twitter account, I have learned that I need to learn the most effective way to tweet the information that I would like people to be engaged in by targeting certain people and using trendy hashtags, for example. After this, I plan on tweeting on a daily basis as practice and really establish myself gradually by learning extra skills that can be journalistic in a way in addition to making a plan on researching what is being spoken of and be involved as much as possible. The influencers on Twitter can further help me with that along with searching and learning through research and simple observation.
