@onujpt's Twitter Assignment

This week our assignment in Social Media was to follow a weeks worth of tweets for two professional people and two companies, and look to see how they utilized the service AND how they used hash tags. So let's dive into this assignment.

@AllAccess
All Access is a company in the radio industry that does a lot of press releases and provides "backstage information" as to what's happening in the industry.

AllAccess is a heavy twitter user, posting somewhere between 25-35 tweets on any given day. On almost every single one of their posts, their is usually a link taking readers back to some news article. And in fact, a lot of their tweets are about news releases they have made on their website. The news releases cover all genres of music... from country to classic rock. While they do a lot of mentioning of their followers in their posts, I never seem to see any hash tags used in their tweeting unless it's their company name. In fact this week the only hash tag used was #AllAccess. I think that they could be doing more, especially when there are big things going on in the music industry in the news. For example award shows, big concerts, etc.

@CedarPoint
Cedar Point is an amusement park based in Sandusky, Ohio that I frequent regularly in the summertime.

Much different from AllAccess, Cedar Point only posts a tweet once a day, sometimes up to three. Primarily, it appears that they are using their twitter account for three different things: interaction with customers, advertising about deals and pricing, and driving traffic back to their web site. Most of the tweets are about purchasing tickets for this upcoming year, and a few are about contests they have going on online. Every once in a while, and the ones I find most important, they have tweets replying to people who have posted something about Cedar Point. For example:

@andythehock Sounds like you might be on the season pass page. We have a "Deals" page featuring the spring sale here: http://ow.ly/4IwwX

You can still see how they are driving people to purchase tickets. Cedar Point does seem to be hopping on the hash tag bandwagon, though. They've used a couple over the past week including #cantwait and #FamilyTravel. Older hash tags that they've used are names of their rides, etc. I'd say Cedar Point could do a little more with interacting with their customers and not using sales at the same time.

@BubbaRadio
"Bubba" is co-host of the largest syndicated country morning show in Radio, Big D & Bubba.

If you want to find a way to connect with the people who are following you, follow this guy... and is co-host. Often times in radio you are taught that you need to connect with your listeners on a very personal level. While it may not sound conventional... you should be able to go out with these people, have a beer, and share good times. Bubba is very impersonal on his twitter, and shares things that are important to him. Tweets about what he's doing, pictures of his daughters fourth-grade play, things going on in the radio station, etc. One thing that is very unorthodox is his grammar. Nowadays we are taught to make sure everything looks proper, things are capitalized, spelling is correct, etc. Well check out one of his tweets:

today's pet peeve: all the people referring to Obama's SPEACH, when in fact he gave a SPEECH..silly, & Lord knows i am NOT perfect either ;)

Yep. They all look like that. Not really the most conventional thing, yet it's working for him. Regardless of how his tweets look, he's very personal and in radio... that's important.

@TheEllenShow
Although it says "Show" it's the personal twitter account for Ellen DeGeneres. Talk show host, lesbian, comedian... hilarious. I love her. But let's talk about her tweeting.

Actually, this account doesn't give a lot of "behind the scenes" looks at her show, but gives more of an inside look to her personal life. Tweeting 7-10 times a day, Ellen posts a lot of pictures of things that she finds amusing, and posts a lot of links. She utilizes a third-party twitter service called TwitPic a lot. Users of TwitPic can take pictures on their mobile phone, upload them to TwitPic and post it directly on their twitter.  I think Ellen does a good job connecting with her customers, even @replying to a lot of them directly. She posts things that she finds funny, amusing, and contests she has going on at the time. All of these things connect directly back to her viewers. Looking at her past 100 or so tweets, there are no hash tags.

Overall, I think there are a lot of people using twitter out there, but this whole hash tag thing is either pointless, or isn't understood. I think twitter should offer some seminars on how to use hash tags, and provide some good examples of why we should be using them. #ComeOnTwitter