I've been on Twitter for 6 years now and started using it primarily for freelance business within the last year. The main thing I learned from this class was not to overload tweets with too many distractions (hashtags, links, etc.). I always assumed the more the better, but what Sandra says totally makes sense!

I'm trying out three tweets using strategies from the class this week:

PHOTO WITH A LINK (NO HASHTAGS)

Normally, I would post a couple of hashtags along with the link but I'm trying to only have one call-to-action, which is to click on the link.

I posted it at lunchtime today, and right now (dinner-time) I haven't had any link clicks. Looking back through my analytics, I generally get between 1-3 link clicks on this type of post. There's still time for someone to click the link, but it seems like the no hashtags experiment hasn't really helped or hurt that much in terms of link clicks.

However, I usually get around 100-150 impressions when I use hashtags on similar posts to this. Right now this particular tweet is only at 28.

UPDATE, 1 DAY LATER: I'm up to 51 impressions and 2 link clicks. So now my link clicks are about average but my impressions are below average.

VIDEO WITH A FEW HASHTAGS

Today, I posted a quick video with a few hashtags. I generally post lots of photos but only the occasional video or GIF. So this was already stepping out of the box a bit! My goal for this tweet was to increase my impressions.

I posted this around lunchtime as well. It's late at night now and I'm at 49 impressions. Another recent short videos/GIFs averaged around 85. Another got 261, and one that got a few retweets (thanks to a couple of @mentions) got 4,789! So I really don't have a good comparison for how videos normally fair for me.

UPDATE, 2 DAYS LATER: Didn't get a chance to check the progress on this tweet yesterday. As of right now it made it up to 75 impressions. Not bad!

TWITTER POLL

Well, this one didn't go very well. I tried something completely new to my Twitter account...a poll! I only had it last for one day. Maybe I should have had it last longer? I feel like a hashtag or two would have helped? It got 34 impressions (so far, one day later) but only one vote...and it was from my fiancé so that probably shouldn't count, haha!

CONCLUSION

I wouldn't call any of these three tweets a huge success or failure, but this class definitely opened my eyes more to really thinking about what I want each one to accomplish.