Rhetorical Velocity in Self-Image Tweets
Rhetorical velocity is used by many twitter accounts as a strategy to try and make their tweets as likely to be shared as possible. In other words, they want their tweets to get favorited and retweeted. When searching through one of the more popular twitter accounts that I follow, @TakeBackBeauty, I noticed a few trends in which tweets were most popular.
First, the tweets that included a photo were much more liked to get retweets and favorites than those that did not have a photo attached. Also, tweets that mentioned a celebrity were very popular. Finally, tweets with quotes from people who are famous are well circulated.
This tweet from @TakeBackBeauty had the most retweets and favorties on their account. It has all of the qualities that I described that give a tweet good rhetorical velocity. It is a picture of a quote by a celebrity, Amy Poehler. The quote is sending a great message to young women everywhere, and it catches the attention of readers since a successful, beautiful actress said it.
I attempted to model my tweets after this one. Four out of the five were photos of quotes from celebrities that were related to self-image. I tried to highlight the main idea of these quotes in the 140 characters I had, but most of the message was represented in the photos themselves.
I decided to tweet an image of “Nine Body Image Truths You Need to Know” because I thought the statistics were shocking and would open the eyes of readers. I thought people might want to share these facts with other people they care about.
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My favorite out of all of yours was the Jennifer Lawrence one, with the quote about body image and Hollywood’s version of “fat.” I thought this one had great rhetorical velocity, because it can be retweeted and shared on other social media platforms. People can take snippets of her quote and tweet it, create a Facebook post about it, or even make a hashtag from it. I also think that Jennifer Lawrence is a great person to post a picture of because just about everyone knows who she is. She has been in tons of movies and won lots of awards, and because of that people may take her advice more seriously then other celebrities who are not as prominent in the film industry. So many young girls want to be like her, and the fact that she acknowledges that makes her seem that much more relatable and caring.
I favorited your “Nine Body Image Truths You Need to Know” tweet. I thought that using an image to convey statistics is a good way to draw in people’s attention. Since the statistics are all in one place it makes it easy for the audience to gain a lot of information by only going to one place (looking at your image). Since like you said, all of the statistics are shocking, the tweet and the information in the photo are definitely things people are going to want to retweet to share with their followers.
I was really shocked by your tweet about the 9 body image truths. I was surprised by the statistics, especially that only 4% of women around the world think they’re beautiful. The fact that you highlighted that statistic in your tweet was very effective. This tweet definitely draws attention to the fact that there is a problem with body image in our society. I also like your hashtag about changing society. It is short, but has a strong message.