Humanizing tweets

I've taken the past few weeks to stop focusing so much on what sources I'm tweeting about and looking more at the community aspect of the Twitter account. From the beginning of the project we've said that people respond far better to humans than to robots. That's why the Twitter accounts that are automatically tweeted from Traps are used to generate interest in Trapit and the 3 or so managed by humans are used to maintain interest.

The account has gotten to the point where it's growing more organically. Without really doing anything to gain followers, we have a steady growth of 2-3 followers/week. I'm still going through and following people who mention the trapitsources account or the main Trapit account, but I'm working on reaching out to people and asking for sources or engaging in conversations more.

The only arena that the "conversation" aspect has really worked with so far is education/edutech. This happened kind of on accident, but I've managed to garner interest in my personal Twitter account for photography and graphical design by using certain words and hashtags so I'm going to try to do the same with other topics on the trapitsources account.

Another change that I've made is the type of voice I'm using. I've started speaking more in first person and talking more about life outside of Twitter to sort of humanize the account. The main difference I've noticed since this change is that people are far more likely to respond to @ or DM tweets. I guess if they know they're talking to a person and not a computer it makes it more appealing to respond?

Anywho, that's where we stand. Next week: things get statistical.

Diversifying

This week I worked up a list of topics the Twitter feed covers pretty well and investigated some others that we might want to delve into:

Covered well:

1. Education
2. Food/Nutrition
3. Crafting/DIY
4. Cartography/Geography 

Things to work on:

1. Fashion
2. Travel
3. Fitness
4. Sports
5. Health
6. Architecture
7. Music

Experiments

This week I tried two new things. One brought the account more followers, the other was more of an experiment that needs work.

The first thing I did was set up searches for the name Trapit. Along with a bunch of tweets in a language I didn't recognize, and some misspelled spam, I found a whole community of people tweeting about Trapit. A lot of these people are in the education industry and have blogs associated with their Twitter accounts. The first thing I did was to follow as many of these people as I could. This brought a serious spike in TrapitDiscovers followers. It also gave me a whole group of blogs to go through and see whether or not they're in Trapit and if they could be tweeted about. I'm in the process of sifting through those now.

The second thing was I tried to develop a hashtag... and it accomplished one of my goals, but otherwise needs more work. My first goal was to save characters in each tweet and get across the fact that the source I was tweeting about was a Trapit discovery. So the hashtag was #TrapitDiscovery. My second goal was to try and get people to start using the hashtag whenever they posted about an article they discovered via Trapit. I used the hashtag both with the TrapitDiscovers account and with my own account. However, I need a way to get more people to start using the hashtag. I thought about just tweeting about it, but I'd rather it get more use before I start publicizing it. I'm going to see if I can get the Trapit team in on this (or help developing a better hashtag to use) before I go any further.

#genius

Did I mention this week has been a struggle? I just realized everything I have listed to document below is already on one of our lists. Brilliant.

Strugglin' with !t

I struggled a bit this week.

Struggle 1: I've been using Trapit for over a month now and I still find myself getting lost looking through pictures and article titles and eventually flat-lining from information overload. As a remedy I've come up with a more methodical way of doing things: 

1. Look through all of the "hot" traps and traps of personal interest.
2. Bookmark 15-20 articles from source names that aren't easily recognizable (major news sources, etc.)
3. Read through the articles to weed out sources that aren't niche or reliable.
4. For the remainder, document the following: 
1. Source Type
2. Article URL
3. Source Title
4. Twitter Handle
5. Write a Tweet for each source, to be put in the queue in Hootsuite.

Struggle 2: The analytics tools for Hootsuite are... lacking. I need to find a way to put together analytics for the following:

1. How many unique views the Twitter profile gets.
2. Keywords used in conjunction with @trapitsources.
3. Twitter "sentiment".
4. How often @trapitsources is mentioned.
5. Rate of follower growth.

There are types of analytics missing from my list, I'm sure; however, this would be a good place to start. I have a list of analytics resources to look into - some are free, others are a bit costly. Further research into these tools is my task for this week, as well as growing the list of sources/tweets for the account and developing further relationships with current/new followers.

Workin' !t

This week all I've done is work my network. I've promoted the site and Twitter feed at work, reached out to my LinkedIn contacts, and bribed my cousins. Every single person I know has now heard about @trapitsources.

That avenue's exhausted and it's time for more tactical measures.

Plans for next week:

1. Pay more attention to the trending Traps as well as Twitter hashtags. The account will have more visibility if it's thrown to a wider audience.

2. Manage connections established this week. Keep people who've recently followed the account interested. Establish a relationship with them.

3. Be prepared and build up content. I want a week's worth of tweets in my back pocket and I want to average out at 2-3 tweets per day.

Capstone Proposal

Proposed Objective: Drive a Twitter-based social media campaign focused on Trapit's collection development project. I'll be helping them find the newest, most niche, and most reliable Internet sources and blogs (or going through what's already being aggregated and taking out what's computer-generated or unreliable), while building an engaged social media community for them. The Twitter account to be used is @trapitsources. The main focus of the capstone will be managing the Twitter account, while doing research into other areas for them to develop their external social media. To help guarantee the success of the Twitter campaign I will research successful campaigns after which I could model the Trapit account.

The culminating project will be a presentation for Trapit personnel including site metrics and recommendations for how to proceed with the Twitter account. It will also include a completed blog documenting the progress of the account/community and a poster to be presented at the end-of-semester capstone poster session.