Rhetorical Velocity on Twitter – Homeless Vets
While searching for tweets about my issue that had the greatest rhetorical velocity, quite a few good examples came to mind. There are many more Twitter accounts addressing the issue of homeless veterans than I had initially thought.
One great account I found was for the Veterans Leadership Program of Western Pennsylvania. They are based in Pittsburgh and help provide services for veterans. They post many relevant links and photos and promote events that will help veterans. As I scrolled down their page, I found quite a few tweets with #NeverForgetVets. Here are two examples:
I think that one of the best ways to increase your rhetorical velocity is to add hashtags so that others can find your tweets easily. This account made their own unique hashtag that will allow viewers to find all of their posts easily. In the first tweet, the account also added #UnitedForWomen and promoted that hashtag at an event. This would help draw people to the event before it happens, and it would also help attendees connect afterwards. This keeps the rhetorical velocity going by allowing followers of the account to continue to interact with it.
This account also increased their rhetorical velocity by tweeting about a news story in a manner that was quick and easy to read, which made it conducive to sharing and retweeting. Like the social media press release, you must include all of the important information in 140 characters.
In this tweet, the VLP engages the reader by asking them a question: do they know about this fact? This immediately makes the reader curious if they did not know the fact already. Then, they add their own hashtags to keep people talking, as I mentioned with the other two examples. Finally, the VLP makes their fact credible by linking to its source.
For my tweets, I decided to do something similar to these examples by creating my own hashtags and linking to articles, attempting to convey my thoughts in an interesting way. My first tweet is an infographic that is quick and easy to read, which increases its rhetorical velocity and engages the viewer. It uses the hashtag “#helpourvets,” which I used in all five tweets. The caption states an important fact from the inforgraphic. My second tweet is also an infographic, but the caption is different in that it states the important fact in question form. To me, this is more engaging to the viewer as it directly addresses them and makes them think about the impact of what they are reading. My third, fourth, and fifth tweets are all relevant news stories that provide a link to make them credible, and use my hashtag to increase the rhetorical velocity.
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I favorited one of your tweets because it did a good job of catching my eye. The first thing that stood out to me was the “$5mil”. It made me want to read more about what this 5 million dollars was doing. The second thing I liked about your tweet was the #helpourvets hashtag. This is a very simple and effective hashtag because it tells about your mission in 11 letters and can be used easily to circulate your topic between your followers or others on twitter.