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.