Twitter & LinkedIn: Worth Bothering With?
Twitter & LinkedIn are, of course, popular social media channels that we are told we HAVE TO use.
LinkedIn, especially, is supposed to be mandatory for professionals, salespeople, job seekers, interns, etc. But, are they worth spending so much time on? I spend a lot of time using them, and others, but I’m not sure how valuable they are. I recently removed myself from Facebook because I wasn’t finding much value in it.
I use LinkedIn to check up on what people are doing, where they work, where they went to school, etc. That’s pretty typical. When I’ve been looking for jobs I check to see if the company I’ve applied to has viewed my profile. I find that not too many people do. I gather intelligence on the people I might be interviewing with or meeting some day, but I don’t see many people doing the same.
I post a lot of updates on LinkedIn and check to see how much they’re being read. It’s interesting to see what works better than others. I will also share my posts on Twitter, Google+ and my own website, as well as StumbleUpon and sometimes Reddit.
Tweet Or Be Tweeted
I find Twitter to be much more interesting. Of course, Donald Trump is the star of Twitter and there is always something fun to read. I find that Twitter is a great source to get news and interesting stories to read.
I post a lot on Twitter and test my tweets by using or not using hashtags, or images or not, or links or not. What I find is that hashtags and images are definitely important.
Whenever I post something regarding Higher Education, I seem to get a lot more impressions. I track this using Twitter Analytics so I can tell for sure.
One-Line Story on Twitter
I think I left the coffee pot on….
Sometimes, I’ll see what the trending hashtags are, which are listed on the left-side of the Twitter page. Today, I saw #1linewed. That looked interesting, so I clicked it to see what that was all about. It is a hashtag to use for writing a one-sentence “story” on Wednesday. Cool! So, I did just that. I thought that may be my tweet would get a wider reception if I included an image to support my story.
I found some images and merged them together to produce an image that was relevant. I used Photoshop to silhouette the images, layer them together and adjust the colors with Curves and Levels to give it that old sci-fi movie look.
Analytics Shows the Way
I’ve been checking my Twitter Analytics to see how it’s doing, and it’s doing pretty well. In just two hours I’m over 200 impressions with an engagement rate of almost 8%. Woo-hoo!
So, what does this really do for me? Did I get a cool job? Did I make new friends? Is there a news crew waiting to interview me? Did it help me lose ten pounds? No, none of these. So, why do it? Welllll, it’s fun to experiment and see the results and maybe it will lead to something. It’s free, it’s easy, so why not!
My 1 Line Wednesday Story Tweet:
Jeff Macharyas @jeffmacharyas
Earth recedes into the distance as I stare out the porthole & wonder if I had turned off the coffee pot. #1linewed pic.twitter.com/ajSii9wp76
Originally published at Jeff Macharyas.
