In the span of this semester I either tweeted or retweeted something right around 200 times. On my personal twitter, since 2014, I’ve only tweeted or retweeted 107 things. So needless to say, tweeting everyday was something very new for me. It came with its challenges, however, I’m glad it was a part of this class because its something I likely would never have experienced otherwise.
This idea of using social media regularly for a class is not completely foreign to me though. When I had Dr. Billinson in the fall, every Tuesday we had to write down five news stories that the Associated Press tweeted about. This was again pretty new to me since I don’t often check the news. However, it did get me in the groove of using my twitter for something other than getting the best memes. It also gave me more insight into a popular reason why many people use social media, information seeking (Whiting & Williams, 2013). Many people use social media as the main way to get their news. While I don’t personally follow any news accounts on my social media I do see it through other peoples posts. Of the seven uses and gratifications that Whiting and Williams proposed, information seeking is pretty low on the list for me (Whiting & Williams, 2013).
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| Associated Press's Twitter |
There were a few challenges that came with tweeting every day. The first and likely one of the more common ones is remembering to tweet every weekday. The easiest solution to this would be to set a daily reminder. However, I try to limit the notifications I receive on my phone, so I don’t really like to set reminders. Most of the time I would tweet around lunch time or right after class, so I established a routine of doing that so I rarely if ever forgot to tweet till later. The other difficulty in tweeting everyday was having something of substance to tweet about. Its much easier to tweet the first thing that comes to mind but thinking of something about social media and relating to class material was really difficult, especially every day. In order to make this a little easier I tried to mix in a few jokes or gifs in order to have something lighter to tweet about. If I could do this over again, I would follow a few accounts that tweet about social media so I could either quote retweet their content, or use it to fuel my own ideas.
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| An example of a more light-hearted tweet of mine |
There were also many things I enjoyed and looked forward to about tweeting every day. The first being how accepting and low consequence it felt. On personal accounts, I often spend a lot of time shaping the content I post to create a certain image of me. However, in my school account, I was able to post without so much thought since the expectations were in writing set by Dr. Bernabo, instead of in my head and set by society. The retweeting requirement also gave a sense of satisfaction when I posted a tweet that got a lot of retweets. Even though classmates were required to do so, it always feels good to have a tweet be retweeted by a lot of people and it really made my newsfeed feel more like a community. This level of social interaction was a big plus for this tweeting assignment. And although it was for a grade, if I were to assign my main uses and gratifications for that account, social interaction would be very high on the list (Whiting & Williams, 2013). This also motivated me to come up with funny tweets that classmates would enjoy.
Tweeting every day has also given me an appreciation for those who do it as a living. I couldn’t help but to think about how time consuming it would be to be an online personality or influencer. With much less guidelines than I had for this class, I feel that I would really struggle to come up with content all the time that others would enjoy. I feel like a lot of influencers fall into this trap of posting generic fabricated content because its what they think others will like instead of posting what they like. Tweeting my own thoughts every day would be easy, but if I was tweeting to impress others, I would struggle greatly.
It also made me wonder if the average focused all their time on amassing a lot of followers on twitter or Instagram, if they would be successful. Or put otherwise, can fame online be a product of hard work or is it a combination of other things. To understand what others thought about this I asked my classmates if they thought they could become an influencer if they tried hard enough. The results were similar to what I thought. Around half of the class thought they could while the other half didn't.
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| Results from the poll |
In other blogs, I’ve analyzed and been critical of other social media users. Now, its time to turn the tables on myself. Overall, I think I did a pretty good job! If I were to give myself a numerical score I would give myself a 94.5 (decimals make it sound more official). Starting with what I could do better, I could have been more interactive with my classmates. Things like quote-tweeting and replying more to other’s tweets would have been easy ways to do this. However, often times I did my tweet and retweets for the day and then didn’t check until the next day, failing to interact with my classmates. Another thing I may have fell short in is the substance of the tweets. I could have been more thoughtful or engaged more class readings with my tweets. Often times I had a more casual tweet in mind, so I rarely took more time out to think about what the best tweet is, instead of the first. Like I said earlier, if I could do it over again, I would follow people who tweet about things similar to what we were learning in class so I could introduce new content to the class. Another thing I would use a bit more is the drafts feature. This would allow me to sit down and in an hour or two I could have substantive tweets for the whole week. This is something that people also utilize in social media campaigns (Baker, 2019). If I were to treat these tweets like a social media campaign, I could even schedule them to post ahead of time. This would really allow me to set aside the time in the beginning of the week and then not have to worry about thinking of quality tweets every day. Although this would be good for a social media campaign, it’s probably overkill for tweeting every day (Baker, 2019).
Along with the missteps, I also am proud of a few things I did during this twitter assignment. Firstly, I’m proud that I was able to regularly tweet for an entire semester. This has made me more willing to post on my personal accounts since I now realize its really not that big of a deal. And finally, I’m glad that I, as well as my classmates, were able to stay positive in such an uncertain time that we are in today. No matter what’s going on outside, it was always nice to log in and know I was surrounded by friendly faces.
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| Random but I was surprised to see so many people have seen my tweets! |
References
Baker, K. (2019, October 1). The ultimate guide to social media marketing campaigns. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-campaigns
Whiting, A., & Williams, D. (2013). Why people use social media: A uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative Market Research 16(4), 362-369). doi:10.1108/QMR-06-2013-0041
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