Nicholas (nwhyte) wrote,
Nicholas
nwhyte

My year on Twitter, by @nwbrux

Since my last roundup on 29 December last yer, I have emitted 4,011 tweets (up from 3,337) and gained 778 followers, taking me to 3,172 from 2,394, including a net gain of 45 on election night (8 May).

By far my most successful tweet was a New Yorker cartoon which I got somewhere off the Web and launched on Twitter at the end of March; it got hundreds of retweets then and then got a significant further signal boost when a major Spanish tech blog (@microsiervos) picked it up in August.

I can't claim credit for the content, but I can claim credit for 709 retweets (with an aggregate number of followers of 1.38 million, second best of the year), 378 likes (best of the year) and 17 replies (also best of the year).

My most successful tweet (by retweets and likes) of my own original content was an observation that came to mind late in the Hugo ceremony in August:

This got 167 retweets, including Paul Cornell, Arthur Chu and Charles Stross (each of whom had 25,000 followers), and 127 likes. The aggregate of potential impressions was 250,000, the fourth best of the year.

Two others (again, sharing others' content rather than originating my own) got more than 50 retweets, this news story (which I guess I picked up from FiveThirtyEight) about a peculiar American election:


And this glorious adaptation of a classic song into sonnet form:


The tweet with the most aggregate impressions was another bit of news on the Hugos from earlier in the cycle. It picked up only 27 retweets, but since one of them was Neil Gaiman (who got it I think from Paul Cornell), the total potential number of viewers was 2.26 million.

This barely counts as my own content. My best-scoring original tweet, measuring by metric of followers, was a sad piece of news from October:

That scored over 300,000 potential impressions in just five retweets - but 294,000 of those were courtesy of Jardine's family members who is well-known in a completely different branch of the arts.

While I've been glad to share interesting or timely content, I've been much less good at participating in conversations on Twitter. I have got drawn into some long exchanges, but they were mostly about the Hugos and generated more heat than light. Here's hoping for a more enlightening year in 2016...
Tags: twitter
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