My Twitter Experience
Twitter is an absolutely amazing platform.
For the first time in my entire life, this class forced me to download and create a Twitter account. If I’m being honest, it was quite an interesting experience.
I finally was able to participate and fully understand the craze about the app. It requires you to be willing to act in the spur of the moment to deliver a stream of consciousness.
As the course continued, I recognized that Twitter just may not be a platform for me.
As an entrepreneur, I know all about analytics and how important they are in guiding the direction and messaging of specific pages. After taking a look at my analytics, they were honestly better than what I expected.
Over this past month, I had 39 tweets with nearly 3.0k impressions and an engagement rate of 0.8%. By any measurement these are terrible numbers, and I am aware of that.
However, much like my presence on other platforms, I just didn’t feel like I was being myself on my Twitter, which really affected how well I could do.
I feel like I was in my head a lot, because this is for a class, and many of the things I wanted to say, I wasn’t sure how they would be interacted with in regards to the structure of the class, so that really held myself back from posting.
I also had such difficulty figuring out what to share or how to say it, all while being hyper aware of the character count. Most of the time, the topics or thought-provoking questions I wanted to share came to me between midnight and 2 a.m., and by that point, I would say to myself, “Who am I even sharing this with?” and would ultimately not share.
It all comes down to me just being in my head.
However, what I did notice is that when I was sharing things I cared about and was interested in, those did the best.
For example, my best post came from another post I saw on my friend’s Instagram story. It gave me my best engagement rate (8.6%) but just barley made my Top 5 in terms of impressions (116). The reason I feel people engaged with it the most is because it had a nice emotional message attached, which from my research says it will then be more likely to be engaged with.
My second best tweet was also something a bit more personal to me. It had an engagement rate of 6.8% with only 72 impressions. I think this one succeeded due to it being more closely related to who I am and the things I like.
Further, I realized that my two best tweets were posted only one minute apart. So when I tweet, I should do so in more clustered bunches around the same time and just be more consistent with the time or day in which I tweet so that it can be more visible.
Upon my review, this leaves me with the question: What now?
Truthfully, I am not a big fan of social media. I think it’s a place where a lot of talking happens and not a lot of listening takes place. I have fun standing on the peripheral of these platforms and analyzing human interaction without putting myself out there.
Frankly, I think I may just be anxious about the judgement that comes with speaking your mind on social media.
Regardless, as an entrepreneur, this is something I must overcome, so to do that, I have found a few things from this experience that may make this better.
To get the best tweets from myself, I need to format my Twitter in a more conversational style. I also need add some structure to it until I become more comfortable.
For example, three days a week, I pose one to three questions to my audience, I answer each one in subsequent tweets, possibly include something visual to draw people in, and — boom — I’ll have quality content that speaks to the things I love while also sharing my opinion on it more deeply. This would create conversation as opposed to feeling like I am talking into a void.
I didn’t expect to be a master in one day, but I am also not overly impressed or excited with the effort I gave. I think the virality of this platform is something that can be extremely beneficial to me as an entrepreneur, and I believe that with my personality, I could have several of these moments.
It’s more so about me being comfortable and being myself. The rest will fall into place.