Twitter Blog Post

Twitter used to be filled with everybody’s instant thoughts on the world. They were given a few sentences to tell the world how they felt. They didn’t advertise, they didn’t spread hate, they didn’t even read news stories at the earliest stages. Twitter was a place where people could connect with each other, to hear others and their opinions, and to enjoy the company of people with similar views as yourself. Today, twitter has become one of the most universal social media platforms ever created. Tweets get seen by thousands of people each second and content is constantly being marketed for you, even based on your browsing history. Recently, Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star have been collaborating on a makeup palette together. Shane has put out videos on YouTube to advertise this makeup and has also been letting everybody on Twitter know about it too. Since Shane Dawson has been around for a while and has recently posted some very popular documentaries, his twitter posts have been extremely popular, getting millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes within hours. This is a tremendous way to get people excited for what they are going to sell in the upcoming future. 

            Apart from social media influencers using Twitter, we also have people in the news media using this network to communicate with the public. Journalists create their own profiles and speak their opinions (within the character limit of course). They can work freelance or they may be part of a news or sports organization. Either way, they use Twitter as their news column whenever they have a story or opinion to share. Especially in the last few years, we have been seeing this more and more with the decline of newspaper sales. Even political members use social media right now more than ever before. In my opinion, Donald Trump was the first presidential candidate to use Twitter daily to post his thoughts. I don’t mean posting a tweet every day from his PR Staff but rather taking it upon himself to speak to the world directly. As soon as Donald Trump was successful getting into the headlines by doing this, many other presidential candidates followed suit.

            In the past year, there have been a few occasions where people have communicated a big topic on Twitter that has reached mass audiences. The most recent announcement came yesterday when Donald Trump tweeted “something very big has just happened!” People would expect a more formal announcement of such a topic, but with the presence of President Trump on Twitter, it is no surprise that he took to the internet to stir successful interest in his announcement. The tweet currently has over 300,000 likes and more than 70,000 retweets, one of his biggest posts to date. Another event that took place this summer were the Amazon rainforest wildfires. It has been said that this year, the number of fires in Brazil doubled from the ones in 2013. There has also been a fair share of controversy regarding false information on these fires all throughout Twitter. The largest theory on the fires is that they were ignited by non-governmental organizations as revenge for Brazil decreasing funding to these organizations. This information is seen to be legitimate, however the photos that were circulating on Twitter, either by news organizations or social media influencers, seemed somewhat misleading. Overall, Twitter seemed like a playground full of images that were illegitimate and with millions of people that believed these photos were real, we can confidently say the use of twitter made this transfer of information a failure. One last event that sparked positive views on Twitter was the launch of Shane Dawson’s YouTube series, displaying the process of his new palette collaboration with Jeffree Star. Shane and Jeffree are already both quite popular in the beauty community and with most of their following on Twitter and Instagram, they are utilizing the publicity they already have. Shane and Jeffree are both tweeting to their followers about the upcoming palette release and these tweets are becoming more popular than most of the tweets made by the president. About halfway to the launch of the palette, they announced that their merch store was now online and about fifteen minutes after that tweet was published, their entire online store sold out of merchandise in ALL sizes. This is the result of communicating effectively through Twitter to advertise a brand of product.

            The twitter account used for this product followed three organizations that in their own way, published content that was vastly different from one another. Good Morning America’s twitter page is extremely active during their show, posting once every few minutes for a few hours. Once their show ended, the tweets came much less frequently, showing that they only post tweets during the time of most traffic to their Twitter account. It was interesting to see what kind of content they posted in relation to what was on their show at the time. Tops Friendly Markets has a Twitter page that posts every few days, often with local advertisements as well as some local shoppers who participated in a sponsored event. This page was interesting to follow as Tops is a grocery chain just for WNY and a lot of people shop at their stores, but many don’t go online to follow them on Twitter. Oprah Winfrey’s page was very positive, promoting for her friends’ products but also posting about topics that she believes can help change the world. I never saw a negative post on her page and she is very well respected in the media industry due to her experience, so it was nice to see how she communicates with the world via Twitter.

            With Twitter, you really must consider what you want to communicate before you make a post. Twitter doesn’t give you unlimited space to share you mind so the more facts in the post the better. Twitter is also about growing interest in something if you are trying to advertise something. People scroll so quickly that if you don’t attract the slightest nerve of people, your post will fly by their timeline. However, if just for sharing your thoughts on a topic, it can be a super quick and easy way to gain feedback, insight, and knowledge of some of the world’s biggest topics today.