Conventions of Twitter Threads .

For the final piece of media created for my story I decided to look towards the promotional and short-form ways of telling this story. One of the best ways to do this is through the use of the twitter thread something that would naturally fit into the explainer format I was already using by the chunking nature of the format. However, what are the conventions for doing this type of short-form story. To observe these I found three relevant examples to analyse below.

1: MTV Albums of the Year.

A Twitter thread was created by MTV here to both fulfil the sort of looking back at 2021 theme on social media with a clever , intriguing twist.

Genre Conventions

We see that straight away we are following the twitter conventions of having images used which according too twitters own marketing research broken down by social media today ( Hutchinson, 2016: line 18) creates 3x more engagement than a simple text only tweet. In addition to this emojis where also seen as a great way of pushing content as they elicit emotions or just a playful nature as is done already with the fact these album covers are made in cake.

There is also great use of traditional brand practices here with the starting tweet posing a sort of “lets find out” question with “The sweetest treat of the year” as well as using the pun of the fact these are cakes. Additionally, all album creators are tagged in each of the listicle style tweets in the thread. The image used is also of good quality with the first one being the brightest and most instantly visually appealing.

Narrative Structure:

With twitter threads they become much more longform as opposed too the short-form structure of a 280 word limited tweet. Nevertheless this is still short-form writing and so with this thread the text in each tweet making up the thread is minimal.

We start with a hooking comment really of the pun “The sweetest treat of the year?” which immediately creates the question of “ what is ?” in the viewers head. We then get this short abstract of these record breaking albums. So answering this question. That is it for the first tweet textually however the image provides the rest of the information in recognisable album covers and the text of record breaking albums of 2021 visible . So they are minimising text in the tweet but maximising it’s use in the image. The following tweets in the thread also use this with text in there images too.

These follow up tweets have all start with a gold cd emoji suggesting a valuable album of this year sort of reminding of the context, before the orientation with the name of the album and then an evaluating fact contained within the image. Whilst I expected some result at the end of the thread there wasn’t which didn’t help the story as it never mentioned top 5 so you know it ends it just didn’t continue.

General comments:

Whilst it was a great idea with visually appealing images of cakes which made it intriguing there was no call to action/ coda at the end that clearly could have been “Missed any records, let us know yours below?”

Audience Construction:

The use of emoji’s suggests that this is largely a younger demographic that have adopted in the use of them mainly 16–30 year olds, not any younger as twitter is more of an older more professional medium. The graphics around the account also suggest this audience with a certain American outlook as it is popular media focused on American artists mostly backed up by the fact there is a separate MTV UK account. Saying this the colour scheme is quite retro harking back to the 90’s however I think this is more to establish that they have been the go to source of popular culture entertainment from then.

2: Student Radio Association, Dog lookalikes.

The second twitter thread is rather a silly one but is done by the student radio association a radio group promoting student media linked to the industry. In there thread they fill “the void” between Christmas and New Years by comparing themselves to dogs!

Genre Conventions:

Again like the MTV video we see that images are used in every part of the thread , to aid engagement, additionally emojis are used this time depicting more emotional thoughts as opposed to nouns as used by MTV . Tagging of the members of the Student Radio Association has also been done however it would perhaps benefit from a hashtag or two like #daysbeweenxmas or something which twitter is most famous for and could generate some interactivity with viewers who may put a picture of what dog they look like.

Narrative Structure:

We start the thread with a abstract and intro piece which poses states the thought “we thought we had no content to post, WRONG” this immediately generates the thought of okay well what are you posting in the viewers head. Following this we have the orientation of why they are going to be showing dog pictures, because of a thought one of the members had.

The complication and evaluation sort of are contained in the picture of this is what the members think they look like but do they? The final parts of the structure then follow with the result of them stating the final picture is here and that they have filled that “purgatory” between Christmas Day and New Years! The coda is that the admin team will be doing the same thing tomorrow implying you can enjoy that tomorrow.

So we see that again we vaguely follow the Cortazzi narrative structure (Fulton , 2005: pp.22–23) not shorter intro, hook and twist structures that you see in a single tweet only . Additionally we see now in both threads they use rhetorical questions to start , suggesting thoughts of you do need to see this!

Audience Construction:

This is a difficult one from the post itself as whilst it is obviously aimed at young people in student radio due to its name the post itself does not have any distinctive hallmarks making this clear. The Student Radio page is rather similar with very few clues other than the heading text “press play on the future of radio” to go on.

General Comments:

Generally a good thread however more emojis could be used and tweets still had lots of text which potentially could have been more concise to enhance interaction. However the use of images was good even if a little repetitive.

3: Kiss FM Xmas Presents.

A twitter thread that simply plays on the nostalgia of Kiss FM listeners by inviting them to reminisce on Christmas presents from back in their youth.

Genre Conventions:

Again we see that they use images on every tweet within the thread to increase engagement as well as clever uses of emojis which according to twitter’s research 80% enjoy discovering (Twitter, 2016: line 27). They do this by using emojis not just as nouns of the presents but also incorporating them instead of writing the numbers. They also use hashtags within the textual part of the tweet a clever way of incorporating them without placing them all at the end.

Narrative Structure:

The structure of this thread is in a listicle format with the top 10 being identified here. It starts with an abstract of “we’re back” with this list before oddly almost going into a coda of what did we miss. An interesting structure but perhaps used for interactivity or to encourage people to read the post as it poses the question of lets see what they have missed then?

The rest of the tweets are mainly formed of numbers with an evaluative remark of why its important memory wise. Before they finish with tweet number 10 quite abruptly with no apparent result. This maybe why they popped the Coda at the start but does create a unsatisfactory ending to the thread almost.

Audience Construction:

The fact that it explicitly mentions noughties kids with the hashtag #00’s immediately creates the audience of adults that were kids/teens when the 2000’s happened suggesting people aged 15–30 which fits with their target audience very well. The actual images themselves also suggest the same as well as the evaluative quotes alongside often from popular culture events that were happening in the noughties. Additionally the surrounding social profile is full of popular culture references like keeping up with the kardashian’s or Little Mix references again pushing for this millennial and young audience.

General Comments:

This is a very good industry example of twitter threads with many social media techniques used such as emoji’s , images and hashtags all placed very well within the tweet . The coda was interesting with it being placed at the beginning however I did think it slightly ruined the ending.

Takeaway points:

• Using a rhetorical question to start the thread works well.
• Emojis are very useful to add emotion and nouns into the piece whilst keeping the text short and concise.
• Images on every part of the thread is almost essential!
• Often use Cortazzi Structure for the narrative format of the thread with each tweet acting as a part of the structure.
• Images used need to be interesting maybe featuring some text to keep interesting.

Bibliography:

1: Hutchison, A. (2016) Images, GIFs or Video — Which Generates the Most Response on Twitter? Available at: Images, GIFs or Video — Which Generates the Most Response on Twitter? | Social Media Today [Accessed 2nd January 2022].

2: Fulton, H. et al. (2005) Narrative and media . Port Melbourne, Vic. ;: Cambridge University Press, pp.22–23.

3: Twitter (2016) Best practices for supercharging campaigns with Branded Hashtags. Available at: Best practices for supercharging campaigns with Branded Hashtags (twitter.com) [Accessed 2nd January 2022].