Hello and welcome to my first blog on the BizLab site! My name is Brian Kelley and I was hired as BizLab’s marketing and promotions summer fellow in early June. I am a Communications major and will be going into my senior year at Merrimack College beginning in September. Since I was hired, I have been observing and learning about the media industry through my experiences and interactions with BizLab. In this blog, I will be discussing the methods and data that have played a role in increasing our social media following on Twitter.

One of the first things that I did when I was hired was to check the previous activity of the account. The activity of the account was vital to check, as it provided me with a more precise idea of the account’s objectives, previous tweets, and analytics. Our Twitter page, @WBURBizLab, was created in October of 2018. As of June 1, we had 231 followers and our tweets had reached 33,200 people. Not a bad number, but something that could be improved upon. In order to discover our strengths and potential areas of improvement, I dove deeper into each individual tweet to find successful trends.

One positive trend that I noticed was when tweets mentioned specific organizations. A January 9th tweet congratulated DCist, LPM, WLRN, VPR, CapRadio, and WDET and tagged each of them by using @ and the station. This post generated 1500 views, 11 likes, and 2 retweets. By tagging each station, we increased the likelihood that the message would be seen by individuals who follow the station, but do not yet follow the @WBURBizLab account.

Another key practice was the inclusion of hashtags. In the time prior to me joining BizLab, there was only one tweet that included a hashtag. The January 11th tweet included the hashtag #pubmedia, which is one of the main identifiers used by public media organizations on Twitter. The tweet generated 2,724 views and can be directly tied to an increase of 4 followers.

Lastly, I found that tweets that included photos would typically increase impressions and followers for our account. For example, there was a media tweet from March that read “We kicked off our first 2019 station workshop with @DCist/@WAMU885 today. We are spending 3 intense days summarizing research, ideating product offerings, and designing lean tests of our ideas. AKA lots of stickies” generated 3,833 impressions. These 3,833 impressions represented over 90% of BizLab’s total Twitter outreach for the month.

To summarize, I found that tagging accounts, including hashtags, and using media (photo or gif) posts has worked for us in the past. By including these more throughout June and July, our following is up to 284 people from 231, which means that we have increased our follower count by about 23% since June 1. Additionally, we have made roughly 13,800 impressions over the past 61 days, which represents 42% of our total from our account’s inception date through May 31st. Tweets from January-mid June are no longer receiving as many views, but tweets from late June- today are still generating impressions, so the 13,800 generated since June 1 will likely increase in the coming days.

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