by By: Jillian Niedermeyer and Jessica Murray
Tuesday’s class focused on the principles of uses and gratifications and other theories surrounding social media. Professor Kelli Matthews (@kmatthews) led a discussion about “diffusion of innovation,” important dynamics in modern social media, and properties of networked publics, among other key topics. The class discussed a wide array of examples to explain these theoretical concepts including the “Flowbee,” the world-record-breaking egg Instagram account and home virtual assistant technologies like Alexa and Cortana.
Live-tweeters Jillian Niedermeyer (@JillNiedermeyer) and Jessica Murray (@jess__murr) engaged with classmates, and all users who follow the “SOJCssm” hashtag, through quotes, polls, questions, links to relevant articles, and imagery. Niedermeyer posted 38 tweets using the Strategic Social Media class’ hashtag “SOJCssm” and Murray posted 28 tweets using the same hashtag. Niedermeyer’s tweet describing advice that she received from Matthews during a previous course about the ratio of professional to personal content on social media earned 893 impressions and 30 engagements for a 3.4 percent total engagement rate. Ten people liked the tweet, 11 expanded the tweet and one clicked on the hashtag after seeing the tweet. Niedermeyer’s tweet that mentioned University of Oregon alumni Corey duBrowa (@coreydu), chief communications officer at Google, received 645 impressions, 14 total engagements and seven likes. duBrowa liked and responded to Niedermeyer’s mention. Overall, Niedermeyer received 137 total likes for her posts, three retweets and twelve replies.
Murray’s tweet posing an interactive question, and highlighting what a classmate said about her personal purpose for maintaining an Instagram account, collected 311 impressions and 7 engagements for a total engagement rate of 2.3 percent. Four people liked the tweet, two people replied and one person expanded the tweet’s details. Murray’s tweet that asked for feedback about the line between personal and professional online appearance earned 242 impressions and six engagements for a 2.5 percent engagement rate. Three people liked this tweet, two people expanded its details and one person retweeted it. A more personal tweet Murray posted in conjunction with the class discussion surrounding the current irrelevance of cable had 237 impressions and eight engagements, for a 3.4 percent total engagement rate. On average, Murray earned two link clicks, 2.5 percent average engagement rate, 43 likes and four replies.
Using an analytics platform called “Hashtracking,” to analyze the data, the most common words used in the class conversation were “social,” “media,” “today,” “class,” and “time.”
This platform also showed which users were the most engaged, though the platform would only
What I loved about this class was the discussion of the impact social media has with uniting masses. This egg account united millions of people to like this photo of an egg in order to dethrone Kylie Jenner from her most liked photo. I think this is why influencers on Instagram or Youtube today play a huge role in the sales of products. Take Gymshark for example. This brand essentially grew online due to Instagram-famous fitness personalities promoting and loving the product. Now this company brings in close to a billion British pounds a year. Both the egg and Gymshark are examples of how social media can unite the masses.