When looking at conservation and environmentalism, Twitter is
a platform commonly used by professionals in order to share information,
pictures and news stories around the globe. The most activity coming out of
Twitter for conservation related topics were from official activist pages or
pages for news websites, it was hard to find everyday Twitter users talking
about my topic. Twitter seems to have evolved to be more professionally orientated
in this regard, very few Twitter users were speaking about this topic unless
they were directly related in a conservation or news journalist field. I followed a few conservation and news focused
Twitter pages in order to keep track of what was trending, focusing on the
hashtag “#conservation” or location hashtags, such as #Australia or #Indonesia.
From this, it was easy to find related content. The biggest and most active
hashtags were the ones in relation to news stories, however, #conservation
seemed to attract decent amounts of news and traffic. I feel as though this is
probably due to big Twitter pages such as Greenpeace, WWF, and Conservation
International using this hashtag to share their stories.
In relation to actually joining in the conversation and
tweeting about the topic, I found that since I had so few followers as a very
new Twitter user my posts didn’t achieve much traction. Posts that I had
retweeted from other sources got a few likes and retweets, but generally the
only attention my posts received were from activism and news related Twitter
profiles. I tried using a retweet of a news story pertaining to something I had
written on my blog to promote my blog, however, looking at analytics for my
post over the week, it didn’t receive much attention as a direct link from my
tweet. I expect with more experience and a build-up of a regular Twitter feed
with similar posts the amount of attention I would receive from my posts would
increase.
In creation of my posts I tried to implement some of the same
techniques I had seen used on other Twitter accounts, such as tagging the news
source site that I had tried to summarise in the tweets I had created. In addition, I left room in the character
space for retweeting and commenting if need be. I would consider using a Twitter
feed in the future if I was to enter the professional sphere as a journalist or
an activist. However, for everyday sharing of writing and creating content,
blogging is a more appropriate platform for my topic than Twitter.
