Viral Tweet Challenge

Posted on by Thomas Hoare

My goal was to go viral on a college campus. While I don’t think I can say I went truly viral, I saw significant engagement on my posts. I tweeted three times was able to meet or exceed nearly all of my objectives: reach at least 10 likes on one tweet, reach at least two replies on one tweet and reach at least five retweets on one tweet. The only one that I failed to achieve was five retweets coming as close as three but no less than two on each tweet.

 

My first tweet of the challenge. This tweet reached 13 likes, three retweets and two replies. It was great to be met with some early success and was encouraging to keep tweeting. My inspiration came from my dinner that night – I was actually making ramen noodles on the stove. I kept the tweet strictly short and text only because most of the hot, viral memes on Twitter are text-based. I think this worked in my favor for my initial engagement. I hoped that when I retweeted it in the evening that it would gain more traction with the night time Twitter users, but my engagement did not increase. I think I should have waited a full day to retweet the tweet.

 

This is my second tweet of the challenge. This reached 34 likes, two retweets and two replies. Here, I saw a significant increase in likes but my retweets decreased by one and replies remained stagnant. I stuck with the cooking theme because I saw the early success, but added some irony because I wasn’t actually cooking, but stealing. The inspiration for this tweet came from my roommates as we are constantly “borrowing” each other’s food. Again I went with only text to hopefully be more relatable and fit in with the current trend. This formula worked well again but I was disappointed with my retweet count. I think this is because I did not follow an established text meme template but rather just made a joke. I promoted this tweet within my Syracuse University network and was able to get some more likes once the Tweet was past its prime. This time when I retweeted it myself, I waited the full day and I got more engagement in this time period than the first tweet proving that my initial hunch of waiting longer had some merit.

 

This is my third and most successful tweet. This tweet saw 40 likes, two retweets and two replies. I stuck with the college cooking theme but added a victim element showing how I know I should cook but I fall victim to ordering food – a very relatable phenomenon. Again I was inspired by the real world as I tweeted after just ordering Chipotle (that was my exact order.) This tweet is modified from the planned tweet in the marketing plan. I changed the tweet because there is a Chipotle on Syracuse University campus and the ordering process is longer than Wendy’s and made for better dialog. I think this is my best tweet of the campaign because I followed a popular text meme on the platform right now. The “Me and Also Me” or “Person, Other Person” conversation format is very popular and often tweets go viral. This tweet is still getting engagement, even as I type this I got a like. What was unique about this tweet was that I also got two quoted tweets, meaning that two people quoted me and added to it. I expected more engagement to come from those quote tweets, but the two accounts were pretty low profile. I think the key to going truly viral would be to capitalize on the quote tweet opportunities.

I abandoned my tweet four that is on the marketing plan because I decided it did not fit the vibe I was trying to curate during this theme. I also did not want to tweet about alcohol and felt I was achieving plenty of success with my other tweets and wanted to focus on promoting those.

Overall, I was satisfied with my Twitter campaign. Tweets two and three were some of my most engaged with tweets I have ever had. I think I can consistently reach these numbers with a chance of going truly viral if I follow my steps in tweet three and follow a more established text meme format. Promoting content within your own network using guerilla tactics is effective I will continue to do so.

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