Twitter Optimization: Sarah Griffin
In this digital media era, there are a multitude of ways to optimize your Twitter experience. Individuals use Twitter to keep up with current events, to follow a topic they love, to connect with others, or to grow a business or a personal brand. When it comes to developing a personal brand, one of the most important aspects is being authentic. Your brand is what differentiates you from everyone else which is why being yourself is so vital. Having your own voice develops your brand and guides you to others who share the same passion. This is what makes Twitter unique. It is a space for everyone to share their voices and interact. Most people believe in order to succeed on Twitter, they have to have a high follower count. This becomes their main focus. While followers are essential for your growth, more importantly is the engagement you receive on your tweets. If your content has high engagement, the followers will come. Engagement on Twitter consists of retweeting, liking, responding, or simply put, any interaction with a tweet. Engagement is extremely valuable when it comes to reaching and building a relationship with your target audience. Twitter has a built-in analytics system where you can track your engagement and tweet relevance. It tells you the number of impressions, interactions, link clicks, etc. Use that to your advantage to learn and see what content of yours was a hit or miss. Overall, when sustaining your personal brand, it is important to be consistent and provide valuable content to your targeted audience.
Personally, I use Twitter to follow and connect with other individuals who share the same interests and passions as me. Pop-culture and baseball pretty much sum up my Twitter feed. As I have mentioned in past blogs, obviously I am a huge fan of baseball, but I am also the definition of a fangirl and pop-culture fanatic. Last year, when I found myself on Boston sports Twitter, I came across a user who is also a die-hard Red Sox fan and whose tweets could not be more in my niche.
A Taylor Swift quote in reference to the Red Sox? Amazing. Easy follow.
Incredibly popular in the Boston sports Twitter community, Sarah Griffin currently has about 14,000 followers. This is due to her being authentic, using her voice, and sharing her passion for baseball creatively. Having that high of a Twitter following was not even something she sought out, which makes her growth that much more genuine. Baseball can be perceived as a dull sport, and on Twitter a lot of the game’s discussions revolve around number-crunching and statistics with not a lot of personality involved. Sarah adds the missing fun, unique voice to the baseball fanbase. She even got Chrissy Teigen interacting with one of her tweets about the game!
She started in college by live tweeting her reaction to Red Sox games in 2018. Not knowing if people enjoyed the Red Sox tweets, she decided to blog about the team instead. Though because the Red Sox were on track for a historic season in 2018, she started sharing her blogs to Twitter. This is when she noticed her tweets started to pick up some engagement.
Her following of course started to come from people who care about the Red Sox and these people encouraged her to continue writing.
As she was tweeting more about the Red Sox, she followed Section 10’s Jared Carrabis and Steve Perrault who are some of the top personalities covering the team. Following them, she recognized a lot of the people who were engaging with their tweets were some of the same people that were replying and interacting to her tweets. Here, she started to realize there was a whole community of people that follow each other over their shared passion for the Red Sox.
She kept tweeting and pursuing her blog throughout the season and by the end of the World Series, had over 2,000 followers.
By that point, she thought about pursuing this as a career. She always wanted to be a sportswriter but never thought it could be something she could do. She connected with more people involved in the industry. They were all telling her that she was already in a solid position. Every connection she made in sports media, she made through her Twitter page. It was how she landed many of her past writing and media gigs as well. She is a current writing contributor for the website, Pitcher’s List, but dreams of one day being a beat writer for an MLB team. Sarah is a perfect example of someone who found her niche on Twitter and optimized it by establishing her own personal brand that is leading her to a career path she loves.
You can find her on twitter @skg_18 and her follow her personal blog here
To wrap up, we predicted the winners of each division for the upcoming season and key players to watch out for.
American League East
Division Winner: New York Yankees
Player to watch: Bo Bichette, SS, Toronto Blue Jays
American League Central
Division Winner: Minnesota Twins
Player to watch: Andrew Benintendi (for obvious reasons), OF, Kansas City Royals
American League West
Division Winner: Houston Astros
Player to watch: Jake Odorizzi, SP, Houston Astros
National League East
Division Winner: Atlanta Braves
Player to watch: Mike Soroka, SP, Atlanta Braves
National League Central
Division Winner: Milwaukee Brewers
Player to watch: Brandon Woodruff, SP, Milwaukee Brewers
National League West
Division Winner: Los Angeles Dodgers
Player to watch: Mike Yastrzemski, OF, San Francisco Giants
