The other day I retweeted a post (see below) that went viral.
My Twitter Stream usually generates less than 5,000 impressions per day, based on 3-5 tweets and retweets per day.
However, this particular retweet generated greater than 100,000 impressions in 51 minutes, and greater than 175,000 impressions in 24 hours.
Retrospectively, how this happened is quite clear.
The initial tweet is from the media arm of Apple TV (see below). It is a trailer for Season Two of Ted Lasso. (For those who don’t know, this is a wonderful TV show about a kind but successful US college football coach who comes to London to take over as coach of a British football team. It’s a witty, sensitive series, one of the best I have seen during “Covid Times.”)
Anyway, at the end of the trailer, Ted makes a joke about unluckiness and the New York Jets. Now, whenever I hear about the New York Jets, I am instantly reminded of their greatest fan, media icon and business development guru Gary Vaynerchuk @GaryVee who wrote one of the early and better books about social media and digital business creation: Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.
Now, although Gary Vaynerchuk talks mostly about how to best approach marketing in the digital age, he is also somewhat obsessed with the New York Jets. One of his stated goals is to become part owner one day (something not necessarily out of his reach, as he has already decided part ownership of one NFL team). Knowing of his deep interest in both media (in my retweet’s case, exemplified by Apple) and the New York Jets I retweeted the Apple TV tweet, adding @GaryVee in the quote line:
“I hope @garyvee doesn’t see this Apple trailer, which at the end mentions the @nyjets.”
He then retweeted my retweet with two words:
“Damn it !!!”
Keeping in mind he has 2.3 Million followers, my retweet rapidly exploded.
A couple thoughts about all of this.
First, my initial retweet was fairly benign, about a rather light subject. and, apart from watching the trailer, the whole thing took less than 1 minute to create and send. it was therefore quite a surprise to me when it exploded.
And second, Gary Vaynerchuk is well aware of his social media reach and influence, and tends to only tweet out positive or helpful things; in other words, he doesn’t use his platform to hurt people, “call them out”, or bully them. He is a white hat tweeter.
The combination of these things resulted in zero backlash; just a few extra visitors to my Twitter profile and website and not a single negative comment.
But what if my tweet had been about some hot socio-political issue and had been picked up and retweeted by someone with similar reach, but perhaps with more malicious intent: a black hat tweeter? If 200,000 thousand people had viewed some tweet I had created about a controversial topic, would I have been prepared for hundreds of negative comments? How about letters to my employer, or complaints to the state medical boards? Is the pleasure I get from creating one controversial tweet really worth my career?
This downside risk of virality (there is rarely any upside!) is one of the reasons I have the Twitter rules which I do. For example, I do not tweet, retweet, or comment on political issues. (I happen to be quite engaged politically—but not on social media). I also do not engage in any way with people on Twitter who I don’t think are nice people, even if I agree with them. And also I have an extremely low threshold for muting and blocking.
Bottom line? Be careful on social media.