Drew's 8th and final blog post

Well… It turns out that I suck at tweeting.

       At the beginning of the semester, the idea of tweeting everyday sounded like it would be an easy thing to do. I had flashbacks to high school, where I would tweet multiple times a day with no care as to what I was tweeting or who was reading my tweets. As I transitioned to college, my days of actively tweeting evolved to becoming a silent observer. Over the last 4 years I have created a habit of being on Twitter all of the time and NOT tweeting, and I believe that this ultimately became my downfall when it came to this assignment.

       I think the biggest challenge for me was 1) thinking of content to tweet about, and 2) actually remembering to tweet. It had been so long since I had actively tried to tweet that I could not break the habit of getting on Twitter just to read other people’s tweets, and then not tweet my ideas. When I would remember to tweet, I found it was really difficult to articulate the ideas in my head. I probably over-thought each of my tweets, leaving them in the ‘draft’ folder forever. I wanted each of my tweets to be perfect, with the proper grammar and wording that could be understood by everyone who read it. I get that this overthinking is probably counter-intuitive to the Twitter model of ‘think something, tweet something,’ but I guess as I got older, I cared more about what people thought of my tweets. I did find that retweeting other people’s tweets was easier, but then I would get too picky on the tweets I wanted to retweet and I focused on tweets that resonated with me.

       Another challenge I noticed was that I normally wouldn’t see my fellow classmate’s tweets on my timeline. I guess the Twitter algorithm was so in tuned to my personal taste (because I was using

my 4 year old personal account) so it wouldn’t show me much of my classmates tweets, I would have to search the hashtag to see a majority of the tweets. I also had to turn on the tweet notifications for whenever Dr. B tweeted, so that I wouldn’t miss anything important.

       Did I enjoy anything? Yes. I thought it was cool to be able to interact with classmates in Twitter. It was helpful to see what other people in the class were thinking about certain things we learned about in class, and it helped further discussions that we were having in class. Twitter also came in clutch a few times when it came to when the blogs were due. I would notice that there would be more tweets about the blog topic, which would lead to me realizing that the blog was due in two days. I also thought it was cool that we were able to interact with Dr. B through Twitter and receive updates that way. After I had turned on the notifications, I was able to get the class updates quickly, much quicker than through Scholar or email.

       I also really enjoyed the “Live Tweet” event that we did for class. It was a lot of fun to interact with the class in that way, and I wish that we could have done more of that. I felt that I was able to do better at that because it was high paced, so I did not think as much when I was tweeting, I was just trying to get more content out there for the rest of the class to see and interact with. I am a huge fan of reading live tweets about certain shows, and after this exercise I think I might start live tweeting more often about shows that I enjoy.

      One thing I learned about this assignment is that it is a lot more work to run an account than I thought it would be. I think in order to run a successful account, you need to be fully involved with the page at all times. The other key is generating a lot of content, so that it shows up consistently on your follower’s timeline. I think that the most successful twitter personalities and accounts create enough content that at least one of their tweets is seen by their followers almost every time they scroll through Twitter. I think another key to being successful on social media is understanding your audience. The reason I follow certain Twitter personalities is because they tweet with a sense of humor that I relate to, and I think most of their followers relate to, so making sure that you understand who is reading your tweets will help in growing the page.

      I believe that where I feel short was with the content creation part. I think the tweets I tweeted were quality tweets that resonated with other classmates, and I engaged with other classmates about what they were tweeting, but in the long run, I did not create enough content to run a successful, or even adequate Twitter page. If this was a page that I was trying to run as a personality or business, it would definitely flop big time. If I could do it all over again, I would tweet much more than I did, and try to make it a habit to tweet more but worry about what I’m tweeting less.

      If I’m and going to give myself a grade here it would probably be a 30 out of 50.

     I know that I did not meet the weekly requirements when it came to original tweets, but I did do my retweeting more often. I also feel that most of the tweets I put out there were quality tweets and they received some decent engagement, even from people who weren’t in my class (my high school history teacher ‘liked’ a couple of my tweets. That’s kinda weird, right?). Overall, I really enjoyed this class. I learned a lot about parts of social media I did not even knew existed, and I also learned more about social media that I kinda knew about before.

I hope everyone has a great quarantined summer!

-Drew Camp