My Experience with X

Being a high school athlete with an ambition to compete at the collegiate level, I utilized X, formerly Twitter, to upload highlight reels from my games. As the oldest child in my family, and due to the rise of recruiting trends, my mom dove deep into best-practice books and articles on how to get noticed by college coaches, all of which recommended creating and frequently tending to an X account. 

Photo from Freepik

Outside of that, I have never used X for any other reason. In fact, I deleted my account at the beginning of the year since there was no need to continue a recruitment account, especially one focused heavily on basketball content. This got me wondering if the reason that X is now considered a video-centric platform stems from the college recruitment that takes place. Looking through the chapter and reading that 30%-40% of posts should be replies to others, I recalled that 100% of my posts were reposts. I usually only opened the app when I received a message from a coach or to upload film. 

In my immediate family, the only person who is currently on X is my younger brother. He is going through the college recruiting process and uses the app to post football highlights. Neither of my parents is on the app, with both using Facebook as their social media app of choice. 

After reading the chapter, I learned many things that surprised me. On X, posts have a limited shelf life of 15-20 minutes. This was much shorter than I anticipated. Additionally, posts reach 75% of their audience in less than three hours. This again seemed like a relatively small timeframe to me, but after learning about the high frequency of posts on the platform, it started to make sense. After recalling that in my immediate family, only my brother is on the app, I realized I did not know many people who are on X, especially those around my age. With this information, I expected the most common age to be younger, aligning with the ages of students going through the college recruiting process. When I read that the most common age range on the app was 25-34, I expected it to be much lower. 

Something I was not surprised about is that X is the 14th most popular app. This did not surprise me because I feel like my generation is not commonly on it, compared with Snapchat and Instagram.