Week 8B: Delving Into Twitter

This blog post will detail the Makers Space's first dive into Twitter. 

When initially creating the page, Twitter automatically drafts a list of potential pages/accounts to follow which I decided to go along with. Although, I'm considering doing a pruning of these initial follows as many are as relevant to the goals of the Makers Space. Part of this was that my initial search terms were too general, as I was limited to 'furniture' and 'design' which I can do better than. This is where the advanced search feature comes in handy. My initial search terms were the same as before but now I have the option to limit the search to an exact phrase such as "furniture design," "industrial art," and "design fabrication" all of which were much more specific and gets me closer to the people who would be interested in Maker services. These phrases yielded really good search results but when getting perhaps too specific ("industrial furniture design") then too few or no results begin to show up. The people that were turning up included designers, some fabricators, furniture stores, fabricators, and industrial artists and enthusiasts which were exactly my market. 

Lists on Twitter are similar to the aim of the advanced search results in that the object is to quickly get to the accounts relevant to achieving what goals you have for social media. The difference would be, put in relative terms, you pick the search term and that stands as the list title and then pick pages you follow (your results) to put into those lists. The utility comes in when you can actually use these lists to filter your feed to see just what user's pages are relevant to that specific search term you use. The ones I chose were furniture and industrial design. I was okay with making them general since I have yet to acquire the following that would require anything more particular. And this feature is pretty cool. I can quickly respond or retweet any page I want to gain rapport with. 

The most popular time to tweet is in the morning, probably between 8 am and 9 am since pacific time leads the other US time zones. This also would make the most popular time and heaviest opportunity for engagement around 11 am to 12 pm generally.