Erika & Amanda's Twitter Project Wrap Up

For our project, we decided on utilizing Twitter to create, share and publicize content. We decided to put our main focus towards trends in social media as well as share progress updates from our class. We figured we should do about 25% personal content posts such as info about class guest speakers, project updates and links to our class blog. The other 75% would retweets by social media experts we were following and finding our own content online (i.e. articles, blogs etc) about social media and share those. Once we started our Twitter account (@UCCS_Mktg4700) we began to search for media experts and business experts to follow on Twitter. As it turns out searching based on categories is easy but not specific enough for what we were looking for. Luckily, we did know of some people and companies that were icons in the social media and business news world to follow such as Amber Mac and Mashable. We also utilized Twitter’s suggested people to follow based on the content we wanted to post. As time went on we also tried different tools for Twitter such as bit.ly, which shortens URLs so they fit into the 140 character space, TwitPic to share photos, phone applications such as Peep and Twitter for Android to post content on the go and finally HootSuite, which allowed for us to schedule tweets and also make one update that would be posted on several of our social media accounts (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare). We also learned about hash tags (#) for subject matter when searching Twitter, mentions (@username) to mention people or companies we were referring to, and trends such as Follow Friday (#FF)  and Marketing Monday (#mm) where you post suggestions of people to follow using mentions. By the end of the project, we learned a lot of basic tools to run a successful Twitter page. We ended up following 35 people, had 19 followers and made 60 tweets. We learned that the more you tweet and the better use of appropriate & interesting hash-tagged subjects, the more followers you will get. I think as time went on, we learned to tweet more and find original content, rather than retweeting mostly everyone else’s content. Overall, we consider our project to be a success in our ability to create, share and publicize content from Twitter.

Follow us: @UCCS_Mktg4700  Thanks!