I Never Thought This Would Happen With My Tweet!

I'll start this by admitting guilt. I saw a photo on a friend's Facebook timeline and asked if I could share it. She admitted that it wasn't her photo and, after a little digging, the source was still unknown. I saved it and re-shared it later in the day, first on a parent-humour Facebook page that I help administrate as part of a growing project and secondly on my own Twitter timeline.

It's really interesting to see how people react to shared media.  The Facebook post got hardly any attention at all (3 reactions and a low reach) but the tweet... well, that's a different story in itself.  On the same day I bemoaned all the images used in tweets now made the 'plain' tweets stand out more, this tweet of mine with a picture attached started growing in popularity. 

Hang on... that children's book is called WHAT? 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/bNRaLlKjuo

— Nickie 🍷 (@nickieohara) December 7, 2016

A friend of mine had a tweet go viral during Eurovision once and I'd always wondered how/when it would happen to me, if ever. The new 'everyone will be famous for 15 minutes' is definitely 'when will my social media update be picked up by Buzzfeed and shared by thousands?'  Every share brings it to a new audience and the likes/favourites ring in too.

Now, I love analysing everything; I want to dig deeper into the widening ripples of how media is experienced and what captures people's attention so what did I gain from having a tweet go viral? Let's start with the following: 

• A timeline full of notifications alerting me to people liking and sharing the tweet (thank the Twitter Gods for Tweetdeck and the ability to separate notifications into different columns);
• The occasional reply with just one word : GIANT - y'know... just in case I didn't actually realise;
• The knowledge that a tweet that is not time-sensitive will probably 'ripple' further and for longer than something that is of the moment;
• No additional followers and no adding to Twitter lists. All this wit and wisdom is wasted;
• An understanding why people of note do not, and cannot, reply to all their @mentions. It's completely unsustainable especially if this happens every single day. They must use Twitter lists to see their friend's replies or just dive in and hope for the best!

I did have a dig around and look at the some of the people who were liking and retweeting and, oh boy, it's a small world. There's a huge crossover of followers and a very small amount of people who have no 'six degrees of Twitter' connection to me whatsoever. That in itself is fascinating and makes me want to follow more and more people on Twitter so I get to experience everything. The downside of following too many people is that you'll have too many updates to interact with and miss that one funny tweet that might be noteworthy one day. I'm constantly trying to find that happy medium between interesting content and personal interaction. Anyway...

I've no idea what there is to gain from this experience other than the basking in personal guilt glory and still wait for that message from Buzzfeed to ask if they can use the tweet in their "Best Tweets Of 2016" round-up.... *ahem*

EDITED TO ADD

12.12.16 : Picked up by The Poke : Facebook link | Web link 

Sidenote: If anyone does know the original source of the image please let me know then I can credit it properly.