Still waiting to go viral…

Posted on by Krysta Gnidziejko

Being Twitter famous is harder than it looks.

My Viral Tweet Challenge

For my viral content challenge, I wanted to create tweets that were relatable to a younger audience, somewhere between late high school to recent college grads. It was important to keep in mind Buzzfeed’s style and tone while creating tweets that would also engage with their captive audience as well as my followers. My first tweet was about turning 21 — an important memory many people cherish. The subject matter is easy to relate with and brings the audience to think nostalgically about times before they were of age. My second tweet was playing off Ariana Grande’s new song, “thank u, next” which has taken the internet by storm. By quote-retweeting her and using a popular factor of pizza in the tweet, I felt the content was again easy for my audience to consume.

Goals & Outcomes

My primary goal for these low richness tweets was to create content that is similar in voice as the content produced on Buzzfeed daily. Their voice and tone speaks well to the type of young audience that already exist in my Twitter followers. Because I often do not tweet that much on my account, I knew that my engagements would probably be lower than someone who is a consistent tweeter. Therefore, I kept my goals for engagements pretty low — at least 8 likes and 50 overall impressions. With 630 followers, I felt this was a reasonable amount of engagements to aim for.

This was my first tweet for the content challenge and to my surprise, did fairly well. Looking at the Twitter metrics, I got 11 likes and 29 engagements. On a broader scale, I had 443 impressions and one reply to my tweet. I think the tweet could have done better if I had timed it better instead of posting at 7:45 in the morning.

This second tweet did not do as well as I had hoped. I thought by using Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” tweet, I would draw in a larger audience. However, I think that at this point people are getting over the initial virality of the song’s lyrics. Again, this tweet could’ve been sent at a better time instead of early in the morning. With that, I got one retweet, 3 likes, and 7 engagements mean while this tweet got more impressions at 513 accounts.

Analysis

Overall, I am impressed that my first tweet had 29 engagements especially because I do not tweet as much as I creep on Twitter. I think this tweet about being 21 had better metrics than my second tweet because almost all of my followers are in college around the same age as me so the content is relevant to them. As I mentioned, if I had posted at a better time, I think I could’ve gotten more engagements as well as if I had replied to the one reply I had received to resurface the tweet. I also don’t think cross-promoting my tweet on my other account helped at all because I don’t have enough followers on there that differ from the original account. In tweeting more recently, I’ve noticed I get lots of engagement when I tweet pictures and funny content. The second tweet also did not go viral but I think the joke was overplayed and my audience had seen enough of the “thank u, next” tweets. Even though the tweet felt relevant and relatable, my audience was less engaged as the timeline was probably flooded with tweets just like it. Becoming Twitter famous and going viral is still a goal of mine, even though I’ve learned it’s obviously harder than it looks.

Leave a Reply