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The Best of Bullets Forever's 2015 Tweets: The Analytics Edition

Let's take a look at some of the biggest tweets from our handle over the past calendar year.

By Albert Lee
Some of our Mystics tweets dominated a couple important categories this year.
Some of our Mystics tweets dominated a couple important categories this year.
Stewart W. Small

Here at Bullets Forever, we're known for our social media presence, especially on our Twitter account. On a day to day basis, you can often find tweets on Wizards news, how it connects with pop culture, #KD2DC, and our never-ending feud with Fear The Sword:

Today, let's go through the tweets that were the most notable throughout the 2015 calendar year using Twitter Analytics. Since this post is on December 29, we've only looked at tweets from January 1 through 12 p.m. ET on December 27, 2015.

The Tweets with the most impressions

What is an impression? If you're familiar with pay per click (PPC) marketing, an impression is when someone sees a piece of content, whether it's an ad, video, etc. For Twitter purposes, an impression is when a user sees a Tweet that our account posted.

Why is this important? If someone is going to retweet, like, or click on a link, they have to see it first!

Now that we got this terminology out of the way, let's get to the three tweets with the most impressions of 2015.

1st place: Mystics make the 2015 WNBA Playoffs (97,616 impressions)

John Wall retweeted it to show love to his favorite WNBA team -- and his one-stop shop for everything Wizards. :)

2nd place: John Wall acknowledges that the 76ers are more talented than a top ranked college basketball team (95,494 impressions)

Let's face it, the Sixers are a bad NBA team. They're so bad that people now are asking whether top men's college basketball teams like Duke or Kentucky would be able to beat them. The Wizards lost to the Sixers not long before on Feburary 27, so asking Wall this rhetorical question was just foolish.

But even if the Wizards beat Philly on that February night, this question is outright silly. The Sixers -- as bad as they are in the NBA -- are made up of a team full of young college basketball stars. I'll pick them to beat Kentucky or Duke and they will win nine times out of ten in my opinion.

3rd place: Wizards up by 1 against the Hawks on February 4, 2015, (they lost later) (78,197 impressions)

The Atlanta Hawks came into the game off a franchise-record 19-game win streak which included a 17-0 run for the month of January. Yes, they lost 115-100 to the Pelicans just two days earlier, but it was an opportunity for the Wizards to get back against their divisional foe after a 120-89 blowout loss during that magnificent run. Unfortunately, the Wizards lost again, 105-96, but Paul Pierce's playoff performance against them made up for it in many ways.

The Three Tweets with the most engagement in 2015

What is engagement? An engagement on Twitter includes the following:

  • A retweet
  • A like (f/k/a favorite)
  • A click on the tweet to see it individually
  • A click on a link within the tweet
  • A click on the picture or video featuring the tweet (if applicable)

In the Twitter world, people tend to fall in love with Retweets and Likes because other accounts can see the raw numbers behind how much visible engagement any one tweet has. However, the link and media clicks also show how much the audience is paying attention to a tweet you write. Retweets are great, but link and picture clicks are just as great, if not more so. Let's get to the three tweets with the most engagements.

1st place: Bria Hartley, #WNBABallot (28,302 engagements out of 64,863 impressions)

We spent early July handing out WNBA All-Star votes to each Mystics player where Emma Meesseman and Stefanie Dolson were named All-Star reserves to the game, which was held at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. Of all the votes we cast, this one -- featuring one of her 2014 highlights -- went viral.

As you know with NBA and WNBA All-Star voting, only retweets count as votes for the All-Star game. This post was retweeted 263 times, which accounted for 14.3 percent of the 1,837 votes that she received. If Hartley wasn't injured all season, it's likely that she would have started like she did in 2014 and earned more votes.

2nd place: John Wall makes a highlight on January 25 (17,475 engagements out of 34,848 impressions)

We can't find the original vine, but when John Wall makes highlight plays, Wizards Twitter goes crazy.

3rd place: Wall makes another great play on the same day (16,517 engagements out of 44,694 impressions)

It's such a shame that Wall was locked out of the State Farm National Bureau of Assists when he makes difficult passes look easy.

The Three Most Retweeted Tweets in 2015

As mentioned earlier, retweets are the most visible form of engagement. So let's review the three most retweeted tweets from our handle:

1st place: Kevin Durant wants you to follow Kelly Oubre on Instagram (513 retweets)

This was tweeted on the day of the NBA Draft. Whenever Durant mentions anything Wizards-related, that #KD2DC machine starts rolling once again.

2nd place: John Wall peforms 360 layup and turns Matt Barnes into sad Michael Jordan (386 retweets)

Sad MJ was one of the biggest memes in 2015, even though that picture has been used regularly since 2009 when he was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame.

3rd place: John Wall's aforementioned tweet on the Wizards losing to the Sixers (349 retweets)

You can read the backstory above under the tweets with the most impressions.

4th place: Michael Jordan's Wizards tenure was much better than Kobe Bryant's and Peyton Mannings' performance this fall.

Since we already talked about Wall's Sixers comment, we went down to the tweet with the fourth-most retweets. In late November, two out-of-their-prime sporting legends -- Lakers guard Kobe Bryant and Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning -- were performing poorly for their teams. Social media was soon quick to compare them with Jordan when he played for the Wizards.

However, that's not entirely accurate. Mitchell Northam wrote about Jordan's tenure in D.C. where he remained an All-Star caliber player, even if he wasn't in his Chicago Bulls form. Click on the link in the tweet to read.

The Three Tweets that had the most link clicks in 2015

Bullets Forever is a website. In digital marketing and communications classes, you will likely get this line when it comes to social media:

LINK IT TO YOUR WEBSITE!

Therefore, social media is just an extension of Bullets Forever, not a replacement. Now, let's share the three tweets with the most URL clicks in 2015.

1st place: Kyrie Irving is a better point guard that John Wall (1,235 clicks)

He really is, for these reasons, including the fact that:

Oh wait. That post was written on April 1.

APRIL FOOLS!

2nd place: Wall's Yo-Yo Dribble (1,101 clicks)

Wall pulled off the Yo-Yo dribble several times in the 2014-15 season and the NBA caught notice of it. Ryan Gracia had a chance to ask him what it was like after the Wizards' home game against the Spurs on January 13 when he said:

It's just something I've worked on in practice. Me and Drew talked about it and [he] helped me. Just an opportunity to get guys off balance and try to make a play.

3rd place: Gilbert Arenas celebrates the Wizards' sweep of the Raptors in the playoffs (971 clicks)

In the spring, the former Wizards star showed his fandom for the team via Instagram which made him an unofficial fan ambassador. Unfortunately, the original post is now unavailable but most of his posts during that time put him on the good side of many fans once again for a little while.

This isn't the only post we'll have on the year that's about to be. We'll also share things like best highlights, Facebook posts, and our staff's favorite stories later in the week!