When a Tweet goes Viral
If you have a Twitter, or Facebook, or social media you know how when you see something go viral. A post that “blows up” means it is found all over the internet, shared and re-shared until just about everyone has seen it. However, the way Facebook and Twitter have their sites set up make it significantly easier to have something go viral than a post on Instagram or something else. Specifically, Twitter has a great system and that is the retweet.
Unlike Instagram, Twitter has a quick easy interaction to a tweet which is a retweet in which that tweet comes up on every one of your followers page. This is what makes it possible for a Tweet from someone with just 100 followers to get as many likes as someone with 100k followers (something that would be nearly impossible for the same situation on Instagram). If for example someone with 100 followers tweets something and on average just 2 of his followers retweet, and on average 2 of there followers retweet one can see how it is a cascading effect and exponential growth. Of course it is rare for a tweet to blow up, but generally what happens is when a tweet gets alot of interaction, it tends to get ALOT of interaction. From an article that explains this phenomenon the author explains a case where a tweet was pretty stagnant at first but then a day later seemed to blow up:
“This Tweet was posted on April 16 at 2:48 pm PT. At first, this Tweet performed like most Tweets; it got a few retweets, replies and likes. But about a day later, something very different happened. When most Tweets would stop getting any new engagement after a day, this Tweet started getting a whole lot more engagement. Over the course of the next week, it generated more than 2500 retweets, 3700 likes, and 5 million potential impressions”
In the image you can see the tweet did little to no numbers early on, but once it hit the inflection point it grew thousands of times bigger in just a fraction of the time.
The fact how really anybody can go viral (given a dope tweet) demonstrates exactly how the internet is just one large connected component.
https://unionmetrics.com/blog/2016/08/when-a-tweet-goes-viral/